Piercing Reminders

I have a nail in my pocket today.

If you are a wife whose husband is in construction you know the importance of having to check their pant pockets before you do laundry. You will here the crackle and dings all throughout the machine if you don’t empty their pockets from all the nails, drill bits, and random things of metal that I don’t even know what they are called. There are always things from work floating around in my husband’s pockets. One time I was able to collect $14 just from cleaning his work clothes.

Today, the nail in the pant pocket is mine. I put it there, and I may be walking around with it for a while. I seem to be walking around with triggers of condemnation piercing my heart, reminding me that I am a sinner, reminding me that I could mess up again, reminding me of what the world sees and not my God. Piercing voices that press play in my head of the things that have been said to me and the hurtful labels that I get stuck in a sensitive moment believing to be true.

With my Bible in front of me I feel invincible, and with a powerful song playing on my iphone with my earbuds in my ears, I feel invincible, because I am sitting in the truth of what it means to be a child of God. I am hearing the Spirit’s voice telling me the love and grace that I get but don’t deserve.

But what about the moments in between? What about the moments where I get lost in my nature, lost in the war of my flesh, lost in the forgetfulness of who made me, of who sees me, of who I live for, and who promises to protect me? What about those moments?

I need a reminder.

I need a piercing reminder of who God is and that the voice of condemnation may come from this world but it isn’t coming from my Father. The nails on the cross were my sin, I am making it personal, they were my sins, I put Him there. He came because I got it wrong, because I messed up, and because I am messing up.

My nails held Him there, but His arms are holding me now.

I have a nail in my pocket to remind me that the nail isn’t there on the cross anymore. When Jesus rose from the grave He came with scars but without nails. I have the nail in my pocket not as a reminder of the sin I carry with me, but as a reminder of what’s already been done. To remind me in the moments that I forget, every hour that I forget, every night before I go to sleep and I start to forget, that I am redeemed, that I have been forgiven, that this nail will be my reminder to point me back to the cross with the scripture in my mind that I repeat over and over from Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”. In fact the whole Romans 8 is where I stay sometimes just to get the voices out of my head.

This is why there is a nail in my pocket. God wants to remind me, His Spirit’s voice is present with me, Christ died to have a relationship with me. This is what He’s showing me today in a real tangible way.

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