My latest book is called, Starting Over...how to find God's forgiveness when you find it hard to forgive yourself.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to post selections from the new book. It's a short devotional with twenty meditations about God's radical, unconditional forgiveness.

Day One: Throwing it all away

TIME magazine reported the reemergence of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York. He was known as a man who fought corruption with a vengeance only to be exposed as a regular user of a high dollar prostitution ring. To make matters worse, he covered his addiction by sending money to shell corporations that funneled the money back to the prostitution ring. TIME called it,

…hypocrisy on a scale that was hard to fathom…as if Eliot Ness had been busted for peddling gin from his apartment. [1]

When the news hit the paper, his career was over. Currently he is trying to find his way back into politics, but the writer of the story wasn’t so sure it could happen. She said,

To learn that Spitzer was the world’s biggest hypocrite, that he’d thrown it all away to frequent prostitutes, was devastating, a lapse that could never be forgiven.

When she mentioned this to Spitzer, he responded,

“'How do you think I feel?' he said, his eyes welling up. 'I know exactly how you feel. At one point I stood for something that was important and useful. I was in a place in time where I had a purpose, where it mattered. And then I destroyed it.'”

Thankfully his wife seemed to forgive him but not without some residue in their relationship. The article said,

His wife…appears to have forgiven him. “I don’t know if you can ever mend something like this, in the sense of repair the canvas so that you never see the tear in the fabric,” he said. “I’m incredibly lucky to be with a woman who is willing to deal with that tear in the fabric and keep moving forward.”[2]

Spitzer said there would always be a scar in the fabric of his marriage. TIME said the public would never be able to forgive him. And Spitzer himself said he destroyed his purpose in life.

As I read this, it made me wonder if Spitzer will be defined by his indiscretion for the rest of his life. Will his name be synonymous with hypocrisy and prostitution forever? Will he ever be able to move beyond his mistakes or the shame?

Are You Ready to Start Your Life Over?

Maybe you have also made mistakes, or suffered failures, that haunt you and rob you of the life that God planned for you. Can you imagine hitting the “reset” button on your life? How would that change things for you?

God has good things in store for you. He wants to help you start over. That’s what I want to explore over the next few pages. Let’s work at getting your life back.

Thanks for reading this excerpt from chapter one of Starting Over, available on Amazon.com.

[1] Elliot Ness was the leader of the famed “Untouchable” crime squad that fought bootleggers during Prohibition.[2] Eliot Spitzer’s Impossible Mission, by Sheelah Kolhatkar, March 15, 2010, TIME

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