Repent!

A friend's church is hosting a six-week study of the biblical book Acts of the Apostles.  Like with exercise, I know that I will be more faithful to reading the Bible if I'm doing it with a group.  I love this church's pastor and the congregation's acts of social justice, so I asked my friend if I can tag along.

Today was the first day, and our discussion centered mainly on how inclusive the first two chapters of Acts are, with side-notes about how un-inclusive we as humans still are.  But what caught my attention, even though it was a passing comment, was verse 2:38.

Everyone there was reading from the New Standard Revised Version of the Bible, which says,
Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit..."

But I am reading from the "Seek, Find: the Bible for All People" which is a Contemporary English Version of the Bible, which says,
Peter said, “Turn back to God! Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, so that your sins will be forgiven. Then you will be given the Holy Spirit..."

They pretty much say the same thing, but I was struck by the use of the phrase "turn back to God" instead of "repent".  The pastor mentioned that repent comes from the Greek metanoia and means to "turn around". He then physically showed us that it is...

• To turn from a life facing the wall, to a life facing people.
• To turn from a life of destruction, to a life of creation.
• To turn from a life of isolation, to a life of community.

The pastor continued on with verse 39, which is also pretty cool, but I sat and pondered metanoia some more.  In starting to write this blog post, I did a quick search for the definition, and I didn't find anything that quite fit with what I was looking for.  Most of the dictionaries referred to a spiritual conversion, which doesn't have the right connotation.  

I (we) don't just repent or turn around once in our lives, which is the connotation of the word conversion.  I (we) repent daily, hourly even.  I get turned away from God often, and so I often need to "turn back to God"; I often need to repent.  I probably needed to repent several times just while sitting in the Bible study inside a church.  I don't even want to think about how often I need to repent in other more profane settings.

So, I will try from now on to mentally translate the word "repent" to the phrase "turn back to God".