Analogy Challenge - Towels and Repentance

I'm not sure if I can blog today. It's not that I don't have time. I do, or at least, I did earlier this morning. The trouble is that I sometimes don't feel like blogging. Sometimes, I don't have any fresh spiritual insights that I want to share. Sometimes, the insights I have are too personal, or relate to something that doesn't apply to many of you. Sometimes, the "insights" I have are too vague or uninteresting to be worth blogging about.

For example, I thought of an Analogy Challenge: Relating random things to the Gospel. I did it briefly with Snorkeling and Basketball, just to illustrate the idea of the analogy challenge, and I wrote an entire blog post about poop. Just a few days ago, I applied the analogy challenge to Towels.

I related the act of drying off with a towel to repentance. Towels get water off of our bodies (or whatever else we're drying off) and repentance gets sins and transgressions off of our souls. The result is that we become dry, or spiritually clean. But there are some times when drying off with a towel won't help you. For example, if you're standing in the shower and the water's still running, a towel will not help you become and remain dry. Similarly, if we repeatedly allow ourselves to submit to temptation, repeated repentance can help us to get clean, but it might not help us to stay clean. Or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the meaning of repentance.

The way I see it, repenting is what you do after you've committed a sin to get yourself clean of it, and then you need to keep yourself clean of it by avoiding that sin in the future. Some people might say that avoiding the sin in the future is a part of repentance. I'm not sure which is actually more accurate. Just for the sake of the analogy, I'll say that repentance is more of a one-time thing than a process, and the avoiding the sin is something separate that also has to be done in order for the repentance to remain effective.

Either way you look at it, you have to both stop giving in to temptation and pray for forgiveness for past transgressions in order to remain spiritually clean. Whether you achieve self-mastery before or after you repent of your sins may not matter, but in the end, you'll have to do both.

But this is a bad analogy for a number of reasons. Stepping out of the shower is way easier than removing yourself from temptation. Achieving self-mastery is a process, and we're supposed to repent repeatedly along the way. And taking showers is a good thing. I suppose we could change the analogy to mud, saying that it doesn't make sense to wash yourself off if you're still stuck in the mud, but that would mean that it's pointless to repent until you've achieved self-mastery, and that's simply not true.

So, I've been looking at repentance wrong. It's not just praying for forgiveness. It's a process of removing ourselves from sin. It's not something we do after we've overcome our temptations. It's something we do while we're struggling, to help us overcome temptations. Repentance isn't just a way to remove past sins. It's also a commitment to steer clear of future ones. If we continue to submit to temptation without trying to resist it, perhaps that means we're not really repenting, even if we pray for forgiveness every time we give in.

So, no, repentance is not like drying off with a towel. You can probably tell why I wasn't excited to blog about it. I'll have to think of a better analogy later.