It’s been a while since I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, but recently I’ve found myself thinking about The Scarlet Letter . I’ve been feeling such an intense sense of shame, and imagined that I too was wearing a big crimson sign everyone would see. Now I did not commit a crime. I didn’t break any of the Ten Commandments. But what I did do was something that *shouldn’t* be done, or at least that was what I thought everyone else thought. That was what I thought: I couldn’t believe I did it. I felt like I broke all the rules, made a major faux pas, committed the unforgiveable. See my Scarlet Letter?! I would cry whenever talking to friends about the situation, certain that they would judge and reject me for what I had done.
Yet, as I began sharing with my friends, I found that no one seemed to be judging or rejecting me, as I had imagined. They didn’t seem to see a scarlet letter on me.
I realized that I was the one judging myself. For I was guilty of judging and rejecting others. What I was feeling was what I had thought about other people. I had put Scarlet Letters on other people. So I had to suffer my own sentence.
And I realized what God sees when He looks at me. A big Scarlet Letter? No, the only scarlet He sees is the blood of Jesus covering me.
