Fresh Coat

We were asked to help out with one of our new trainings at All Nations.  They called it the village experience.  The students would be asked to enter a "village".  They were given a map and told they would have one day to enter the village and begin making disciples.  The only rule was they could not lie.  The "village" was other All Nations staff.  We had a village chief and a sangoma.  We were a matriarchal society where the men served the women.  We had costumes.  We prayed, worshipped, and made sacrifices to our God, the snake.  We even had our own made up language.  It was a really fun experiment.

Most of the morning was just introductions.  They were trying to figure out who we what and what we believed.  We slowly began to pick up some English words, but more often then not would just say them and laugh.

We worked a little faster than you would experience in a real village as we wanted them to practice all facets of making disciples.  At one point we were sitting and listening to them tell us about their God (we had a translator), they mentioned the word repent.  One of us repeated the word back to them but changed it to repaint.

I sat and thought about that for a minute.  Repent and Repaint.  I haven't gotten to much into the origins of the words, and maybe its a bit of stretch and I just had too much time on my hands, but I like the similarities.  Repent is to feel sorry, self-reproachful, or contrite for past conduct; regret or be conscience-stricken about a past action, attitude, etc. (The Greek word used most in the New Testament for "repent" means "a change of mind")   Repaint is to simply paint something again.  Maybe it was old and chipping, maybe you just didn't like the color, but for whatever reason you are going to stop with the current color and change to a new one.  Repenting is very similar. Maybe you have made some really big mistakes, maybe something small, but for whatever reason you want to stop and change the action or behavior.

Start each day with a fresh coat of paint.

"Repentance is as much a mark of a Christian, as faith is. A very little sin, as the world calls it, is a very great sin to a true Christian."
Charles Spurgeon