What Forgiveness Feels Like

I have been a Christian for quite some time now. As such, I've gotten familiar with the idea of "forgiveness". I don't try to sin (ie: do something morally wrong) but when I do I have become familiar with the process of asking for God to forgive me, struggling to relieve myself of the guilt, and then feeling at ease again. After repeating a process like this over-and-over, sometimes you forget what it first felt like to be forgiven. Last week, Alisha and I got a reminder.

We received the current tally for Roscoe's medical bills in the mail. The bills are broken up into Roscoe's Kaiser stay from 10/6/13 to 1/28/14 (when he was transferred to UCSF):

$1,183,989.50

his stay at UCSF from 1/28/14 to 2/3/14:

$261,125.02

and his stay at Kaiser after returning from UCSF, from 2/3/14 until now:

$638,471.07 (and counting ...)

If you've got a quick brain or a hair trigger on your calculator, you'll know that the above bills add up to a grand total of:

$2,083,585.59

Were it not for the insurance that God has provided us, we certainly would have been bankrupted. This total is more than every penny of income I'd expect to earn from the time Roscoe comes home until the time he leaves for college. We would have had to sell our house, liquidate our belongings, clean out our bank account, and then live the next 2-3 decades in debt. The course of our lives would have been drastically altered. However, the actual amount we'll have to pay will be around $2,000-$3,000.

This is what forgiveness feels like. It is a sense of regaining a state of being that you could never attain by your own initiative, no matter what level of effort or desire you summoned. It's the feeling that you owe your life's work to someone, because they saved you from a dire situation. It's a feeling of gratitude, relief, comfort, and peace.

If you don't have this feeling in regard to morality, it can only be found in Christ:

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will purify us from all unrighteousness."- 1 John 1:9

"And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name."- Acts 22:16

... and this is what forgiveness LOOKS like:

Roscoe is now 27 weeks old. That comes out to roughly this much for every waking moment he's had on this earth:
... $77,170 per week
... $11,024 per day
... $459 per hour

But can you put a price on a smile like that?