šûḇ: Reorienting our Minds

“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” (Joel 2:12-13)

While unspecified in timing, Joel’s collection of prophetic poetry seems to indicate he and God’s people have just come back from exile.

They are in transition - from the disastrous fruits of their sin to a hope for restoration.

This climactic excerpt in particular speaks to their in-between state, hinging on a single term that extends passage out of past darkness into a future underneath the canopy of Adonai’s rulership and lovingkindness. That term is return.

To return is to “turn again” or to “turn back” (literally, to re-turn). It’s the word šûḇ (shuv), which is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek word metanoeō, meaning to repent (a practice we too often conflate today with the sacrament of confession).

While confession is the remorseful admittance of guilt, repentance is the process of changing one’s mind.

However… changing one’s mind is never easy.

Our mind’s carry the fullness of our memories, with neurotransmitters that have been established overtime to fire chemicals throughout our brain associated with thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors.

In other words, the process of repentance fundamentally involves a rewiring of our neurobiologies to align with the goodness, beauty, and truth of God.

This might enhance our understanding of Paul’s words when he makes his exhortation: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)

Throughout our lives, our minds have undoubtedly taken on negative core beliefs, various survival frameworks, and potential traumas based on hurtful or harmful experiences. However, while we are susceptible to many of the damaging influences that wreak havoc around us, our divine Maker has simultaneously filled us with the redemptive gift of neuroplasticity, which is our brain’s ability to reorganize neural pathways and altogether change.

Said differently, at a cellular level, Adonai has made a way for us to reframe our encounters with memories, resurrecting our experiences of the past to provide a redemptive vantage point of our present and future.

It is truly a gift from God to know that renewal and healing is possible!

But… this transformation doesn’t occur by hostile force. Indeed, it cannot be coerced!

Repentance only works from an emotional disposition of empathy, curiosity, patience, gentleness, and kindness, for “God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). Our process of returning to the ways of the Lord simply will not be effective if fueled by irritability, judgment, frustration, and harshness.

At essence, we must taste the fruits of the Spirit to repent. Simultaneously, it is in our repentance, and in our conformity to Holy Spirit, that we then discover the fruits of the Spirit being reproduced within us.

This is the journey of returning.

As we take each step along this rigorous path, our Father is faithful, having prepared for us a place in his Kingdom. We need only repent - not through appearance, but wholeheartedly - for the Kingdom of God is surely at hand.

BONUS:

While we do not live in a theocratic era (as was the context of Joel), I believe that - as was portrayed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures - part of our call to repent as believers is a call to remember the through-line of our faith community’s complicity in injustice, from centuries past to our current moment (…And what more appropriate time to reorient ourselves than during the atrocity that is this election season).

I can think of no better book recommendation than Unsettling Truths by Mark Charles, a Navajo-American activist, journalist, and pastor.

(I also really like Adam Grant’s Think Again from an organizational psychology angle, and Dan Allender’s The Healing Path from a clinical mental health perspective, if you’re not in the “faith & politics” mood!)