The Moment Is Holy Ground
by Donavon L Riley
Behind us lies the cross, not the shame we fear, and before us stretches eternity. Christ calls us to live in the undivided tenderness of the present, where wounds no longer rule and freedom is found. — D.
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We trudge forward, yet our heads are turned backward, as if the past were still hunting us. The regrets cling like burrs to our coat sleeves, the old angers smolder where joy should be. Shame bends us beneath a weight already lifted, guilt binds us with ropes already cut. But look again. Behind us is not the wreckage we imagine—it is the cross. Its arms stretch across all that was, offering mercy deeper than our self-made prisons. We ache to believe what we do not fully grasp: that what we clutch so tightly, the Christ has already released.
It is not our job to remain whole, and so it is that Christ breaks us open to heal us. The cross does not shun the past—it takes it in, a furnace that consumes shame and regret, but leaves the gold behind. We think our wounds disqualify us, yet from those wounds, He forms the genius of our days. Behind us, the hammering of nails; ahead, the hymns of paradise. But the heart falters—haunted by the ruins, deaf to the promise. God does not deal in the false nostalgia of time past nor the fretful musings of what may come. He deals in the now, the undivided tenderness of this breath, this step, this hour.
Still, we resist. To accept the present is to release the past, to unclench our hands and meet the Giver in His moment. Behind us, only the cross. Before us, only eternity. The present is where these two truths converge—a burning hearth that demands our presence. Christ does not offer us a life measured in anxiety, but a life planted by the roots of the kingdom. The wounds may linger, but they no longer rule. The moment is holy ground; step into it. The freedom for which you were made is found here.
D.