Write Off by Cynthia Carlisle Fields

While sitting at lunch today with my Dad, my mind wandered to the days when I worked in the credit industry. I worked for a company that served as a third party lender for PLUS loans. These were federally funded loans that helped parents pay for their children's college education. It was based on credit worthiness and often times a parent's credit history prohibited them from taking advantage of this financial aid program. My company worked with parents who received an initial credit declination in hopes of turning it around to an approval.

Today, my mind thought of the status that would often read, "Write-off." This told us that the creditor after several unsuccessful attempts to collect had simply given up, and wrote the item and the borrower off as a loss. In their opinion that borrower had become a bad business risk and not worth any further effort on their part to collect on the debt. 

I thought about how we as human beings are often written off as bad debt; not worth the effort to save any longer. We are looked at as no longer possessing any value to anyone and so, we are justifiably it may seem, cast into a huge pile of unredeemable rubbish, forgotten, written off. It saddens me to see this practice taking place across the board in our lives as we give up on relationships that we swore were so important to us or turn a blind eye to those struggling and in need. It has become so common place to write each other off simply because we don't measure up to the standards we have created for them. I am even more heartbroken as I watch people leave our churches without knowing why, and without as much as a conversation or act of concern. We have become comfortable with writing each other off without any awareness of what we have left behind.  

I'm so glad that God does not write us off as a loss, bad debt or bad business! We shall forever be in HIS debt for sending His Son to pay the debt for our sins and even though we can never repay it, he does not write us off! Even while putting his plan in place He no doubt knew we would fall, not once, not twice, but over and over again, yet, He has not written us off and he allows us to come to him with a request for an extension, another chance as you will. He accepts our promises to do better and to uphold our end of surrendering our whole lives to his will and even though we fail to fulfill our promises, He still values us as worthy of the attempt to collect our souls for life in eternity with Him!

So, the next time we casually write-off that which God has already deemed priceless, I challenge you to reconsider the price that God paid to save our souls from sin. Bad debt? Perhaps, but still God our father felt we were worth the collection attempt and so he sent his only Son to redeem us and to save us from our sins! He did it just for me, just for you and I'm so glad He did!

The End...