When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.
Colossians 2:13-14 (NIV)
God Made You Alive
The press runs at night because the shop is cooler then and the ink behaves. He’s alone with it from ten until six. Around one in the morning he sees that the batch code on forty thousand cough syrup labels reads 0-9 where it should read 0-6, and that it has been reading that way for a while.
He stops the press and walks the roll back with his thumb until he finds where the good ones end, and there’s more of it than he wants there to be. He’s forty-four and he’s careful, and being careful is most of what he thinks about himself when he thinks about himself at all. In the morning the day crew will weigh the ruined stretch, call the customer, and set the run up again, and none of that is cruel. It’s how the work is done. He takes the roll home in his head anyway, unwound to the same spot.
“He forgave us all our sins.” Paul says that about people who were dead in their sins and in the uncircumcision of their flesh, and God made them alive with Christ. The charge of their legal indebtedness stood against them and condemned them, and God canceled it and took it away, nailing it to the cross.
I decided years ago that I’d never apologize twice for the same thing, and I’ve kept it. Some mornings keeping it is the whole job, because the second apology is always the one that feels like it would finally do something.
Nobody at that shop can lift the roll off the man who ran it, and people rarely manage more than that for each other. God went further with the charge that stood against us and condemned us. He canceled it, and then he took it away, and it’s on a cross now with a nail through it.
The driver comes for the pallet that’s already wrapped, signs the sheet, and backs the truck out into the lot. At ten to six the first of the day crew comes in, sees where the roll is unwound to, and stands there with the printer a minute before either of them says anything about it.
A Prayer to Remember
Father, you’ve already taken this away once, and I went back for it before the day was out. You canceled it and nailed it to the cross, and it hasn’t moved since. Teach me to walk past it without reaching for it again, on the mornings when reaching feels like the honest thing.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
