God might forgive me, but they won't

On my way out here to South Carolina from Washington State, I heard a lot of talk about God and his plan for each of us and his seemingly limitless capacity for forgiveness, which apparently is one of the things that separates him from the rest of us petty, mean grudge-holding dust-eaters down here.

At times, when I was cruising through the country with no Mp3 player and nothing else to listen to except an audio copy of Spalding Gray's 'Monster in a Box' I resorted to the radio, more often then not just hitting the 'scan' button and waiting for something interesting to pop up.

There were moments, lots of them, where it sounded like the radio was speaking directly to me.

"There is nothing," the voice coming out of the speakers would tell me, "That you have done, that is so bad that God won't forgive you for."

I've never been particularly zealous about religion...I went to Methodist Sunday school and attended most Sundays when I was younger, but have usually kept my faith private and on my own terms.

This, however, was tempting.

I could just find a place, fall to my knees, clasp my hands together, weep (not required, but probably couldn't hurt), and beg for forgiveness and everything would be OK.

But, then I thought, that's too easy.

If I did that, I could just walk away, leave the shitstorm I'd left behind and go on about me merry way, whistling a hymn, without a care in the world because God said everything was all right.

His forgiveness wouldn't fix the mess I left behind.

My feeling better wouldn't earn my way back into my son's life.

That kind of forgiveness would serve no purpose than to assuage my guilt, but would do nothing else.

God might forgive me, but my family won't...nor should they.

It felt like the cop-out to end all cop-outs..."Hey sweetie, I know that I lied to you and to everyone we know and created a whole secret life full of random sex and cheap thrills behind your back and lied to your face about it and destroyed your heart and made it pretty impossible for you to trust another adult male again as long as you live and left you holding the bag with our son and created a huge emotional and financial burden and also left you with the task of explaining to everyone what happened and having to deal with the embarrassment and shame of having been a fool to believe and trust me and forcing you to cry yourself to sleep every night and explain to our son what happened to Daddy because he's too filled with shame guilt and remorse to contact anyone...but God says it's all OK, so no worries, right?"

I can't just have this burden removed like that...I can't just ask some invisible man who lives in the sky to make it all go away.

Keep your forgiveness...better, yet dole it out to someone who deserves it.

If I've got to walk around with this ache in my heart over what I've done instead, at least I can feel something.