Put a Pin in Forgiveness
Hey you,
Spring is rapidly melting into summer. This morning I left for work and felt the indefinable shift. It was cool, but the air didn’t bite me anymore as it has done for at least three years. Oh, how happy I am for springtime and summer. Spring was never my favorite season up north. It was always reluctant and just as apt to smack me across the face than to come with kindness. Hence, trust issues. Summer, of course, is glorious up north, but we’re not talking about that.
Nowhere, I think, does spring anywhere as close to intoxicating as the Carolinas. It is soft, perfumed, friendly, and there are riots of blooms everywhere. The whole world becomes the Greatest Show and if you aren’t allergic, it’s the best possible place to be in March and April. Walks are forays into some lower almost-heaven, and the greens, oh the greens!
In the midst of springing new life I am wrestling a hard topic. Forgiveness. What does it mean? What does one do if one cannot stop being angry? It is a disconcerting place to be, especially as a Christian, because despite the fact that we serve a God who has been known to be angry we don’t do well at curiosity in this topic. How can we do what scriptures says and be angry and sin not? Most of us don’t have internal maps for how to navigate these rough seas, and yet so many of us get tossed around on them that it’s hard for me to believe few maps still exist for this.
Mostly the approach is to squash it, which has the unhandy effect of shut down and bitterness, or to sit there and put up monuments to the stink, and revolving around our wounds, bowing to them as a god. Less of us know how to truly care and grieve this process, which granted, is full of an anguished cup we don’t want to drink. If one is going to forgive, one will never be the same again. I think sometimes that is the fight of forgiveness. We want to stay the same and it’s not possible. We must change.
Once one takes up responsibility for one’s emotions it doesn’t do to exploit or deny them, and with them the Spirit. I am irrevocably engaged with the work of keeping my heart soft, open and surrendered to Christ. It is the work of forgiveness. This writing today is because headliners and 30 second Facebook takes have often caused me more struggle, rather than throwing lifelines to help stay afloat.
“Unforgiveness hurts you more than the person who hurt you.”
“Did you know bitterness can cause cancer?”
That sort of thing, you know. It’s confusing. How does one not become bitter? What is forgiveness? For pity’s sake someone stop talking about platitudes carved out of Bible verses and give me something I can hold on to in this pitching sea of darkness! The frustration is that a person fighting unforgiveness is a person wounded. It’s not just like an external enemy that you bat away, or a pill you swallow, it’s part of the healing process itself. I don’t know what a general experience is with this, but personally I find it rough to deal with the idea that these things ought to take no time at all. Chop, chop! Forgive! It’s that easy! Just swallow this Bible verse and it will start to work within 30 minutes! Side effects: may become dizzy, nauseous, show symptoms of irritability, hopelessness, irrational fear, and your eyes might twitch in church.
To understand forgiveness I’ve had to crawl back inside my emotions. Forgiveness is a choice, yes, but it will be an ill-made choice if you haven’t walked the walk and cried the cry and pounded the heavens with honesty. It won’t be genuine, because forgiveness is not an end goal. Not by a long shot. That’s kind of how most of us see it, yes? Manage to forgive and then we can move on. At least in my experience using forgiveness to expedite getting through something is a terrible idea. It’s not how you close out a book, it’s how the book is written.
Will we overcome? The answer to the question is inside forgiveness. Will we find meaning in life again? Again, the answer is inside forgiveness. Forgiveness, well, in a way it is the story. Yours, mine, and most definitely the Gospel.
My “credentials” for writing about this, yes, I forgot. These are not details I like to share over much, but I don’t trust people who talk about anger or forgiveness without authority. Is this something you talk about through observation or theology or intelligentsia, or have you actually felt this agony of trying to pull the tides with your heart? My story is also to illustrate, that I would never tell someone they should not be angry and heartbroken over circumstances that leave them feeling less-than, for reasons I’ll explain later. I would understand being angry at me for the same reasons. People are sinful. It’s how it is. That’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation of why we need forgiveness.
What anger doesn’t allow, is for vengeance. You can be angry, and not sin, but you can’t take vengeance without sin, for that is the Lord’s. Now, a few lines as to my credentials for understanding anything about this topic.
Last September I was involved in an unpleasant breakup. This kind of thing ain’t ever “pleasant” but this one veered slightly in the opposite direction for me, as is wont to happen when someone who says they will walk with you, then disappears with little explanation after months of dating. We never got to talk face-to-face, or even do a phone call, about it.
A week later, on my way to meet some girlfriends who wanted to help support me, I hit a man on a motorcycle. The man’s life was threatened, though thank GOD, he lived. I spent nearly the worst 48 hours of my life waiting to hear if he lived.
Five months later, my mom collapsed in church, and died. I never got to say goodbye. Never even knew she was close to dying.
No one who knows how often
The peonies my mom gave me are used,
As a gravestone by which to weep
Of the loss that pulled out my roots
(From a poem I wrote a month ago)
One processes as best as one can in between, but by my last count I needed to make a choice to forgive, hope I would be forgiven by the man who was critically injured (HIPAA protected any info about him other than life/death), and now, deal with anger at God for mom’s death. Statistically most people get a super stressful event every 6-10 years. I had three in five months, and yes, I am proud of myself for still standing, but have you tried being sustained by the same person with whom you’re extremely angry? As a friend put it, she told God after her brother’s sudden death “God, I still believe in you, but I can’t look you in the face right now.” I can’t tell you how many times those words have buoyed me.
The anguish is mine, and I have walked it faithfully, if not always well. In addition, I walked both sides of it simultaneously. This post is my heart, speaking to yours, but it is also a mindful analysis of what happens to cause the need to forgive at all.
Forgiveness is a restoration of truth in our hearts.
Most of the world understands life as a zero sum game. One gains, so another loses. The balances of justice are constantly disturbed in relationships where self is elevated. This is the basic dilemma that introduces situations where our hearts are devalued. When one person acts in such a way as to withdraw value for themselves, at the expense of someone else, a zero sum transaction is made.
We do this because we believe lies about ourselves and the world. The truth is not in our hearts. It is the way of the world to prioritize our own gain and put our own interests first, and this system of prioritizing our self is called sin. I don’t have a better word, so I’ll call it that. We all know what it means anyway. It’s the wrongness in the world which we have deep in our hearts. We are incapable of changing our hearts. We can change almost everything, like behavior, position, status, etc, etc but we cannot change our hearts by ourselves. That makes us bristle, I know, because we like to think that evolution of intelligence, knowledge, tech, education, psychology, and government has carried us to a better place. It has in some ways, but the hearts always draw back to corruption. Based on the way we treat each other in our private or intimate relationships, and justify gossip, rejection, hard-hearts, and ill behavior we are all one short step away from burning each other at the stake. We need new hearts to replace ours of stone.
We have the atomic problem of sin, for starters, but add something strange to this perverse equation. It is what makes the problem of forgiveness so knotty. Deep within us God’s law is still written on our hearts, and his law is perfect. So perfect and holy, in fact, that when we are hurt or detracted from by humans or life circumstances, grief and anger are the consequences. Our sense of self suffers deeply under these situations.
Some approaches to forgiveness are to continue to devalue this self, which is in itself another branch of thinking from the world, the flesh and the devil. We somehow come at the flawed logic of “because of sin we somehow deserve this gaping need we have for justice and resolution and will now just have to live with the imbalance while doing the best we can to keep ourselves up.” It’s a solution that makes sense if you are still self-powered. Just learn to live with it. Fill that hurting place with fantasies and porn and drugs and alcohol, but do go to church on Sunday and talk about righteousness.
We ignore the fact that need will be filled, if not by Christ, then by something else. We ignore that justice is part of our calling as people of God. You can always do justice to yourself, even if you can’t make others face it.
Another approach to forgiveness is by assuming that the correct validation from other selves will restore us. While we need other people, the balance of value will always be off if we’re still hurting badly in our hearts. Here is where best friends and spouses and family are often the place we turn to, which is actually a good thing if we don’t need them to bolster our value. We might turn to ministry and calling and doctrine to patch our identity. Again, all good things, but not to give us value.
So we continue, pretty much just bouncing back and force between false value and no value, and so we would have continued if there hadn’t been a plot twist in the story.
A God of the universe, King of Kings, the one who we all more or less see as in control (based on what we do in true crisis), our Creator, our sustainer and the One we think should restore the balances of justice did something to completely flip this madness of taking, taking, taking.
He gave his life.
The key phrase here is gave. He did not take back the reins. He did not take back control. He had no need to do that. He is God. He has never been in the slightest danger of having his authority flouted since he is perfect and holy. It is ours which was at stake. As such, what he did is entirely shocking, but really the only thing which makes sense.
He took the balances of the world which we are all busy taking from each other for ourselves, and paid them. We now have infinite (endless) backing for our identity, if we choose to take it. We don’t have to, we can still keep grabbing value from each other, but if we decide to follow Christ and give him our own lives to make him first, we flip the balances of sin because our needs are being filled by the abundant forgiveness of Jesus.
One thing I wrestled with in understanding where Jesus’ forgiveness turns into mine was where humans wound each other. Jesus paid for sin, yeah? So why was I still having to forgive? Why was I hurt like this? Tim Keller says that in some ways, we pay other people’s debts. This makes sense. We all do this in a relational, functioning society. If one person is having a hard day, we’ll cut them some slack, and hopefully help them carry some of it. If a customer bites me off over the phone and I find out their mom died (actually happened) I readily forgive that because I want to. It’s barely a civil infraction at the point. You don’t take that kind of thing to court. You let it go. It wasn’t personal.
But what do we do when the debt becomes large and personal? When in fact, we were hurt in a life-altering, maybe even life-threatening way? Call it more of a relational felony (and sometimes they are legal felonies too). How does one forgive?
This weekend something revelatory straightened my knees on this topic.
If it is sin which has wounded you, and you are waiting for it to heal you, apologize to you, or restore you, it will not. It is only capable of stealing, killing, and destroying. It works through human hearts, and people hurt us, and sometimes that hurt is critically destructive to our wholeness of self.
We are not able to forgive sin. Only Jesus can do that. We are forgiving a person. What a difference. If you are trying to forgive someone’s sin you are paying a debt you are not qualified to pay. It works this way whether it is your sin, or someone else’s. It will ruin a soul to try to be God, and it will usher in a world of hurt. Under this weight we become self-sufficient and proud, religious of heart instead of joyful. We will become thoughtless of how we hurt others, and down play the meaning we play in each other’s lives. We become recessive and isolated, bitter and lonely.
Forgiving someone is actually simple, even if excruciating. It simply means that you give them the value they took from you, and make it “legal.” No one ever takes something from someone else unless they feel a deficit within themselves, and because we are now powered by Jesus’ forgiveness of sin and what he says about our wholeness (or holiness), we are able to do the impossible, which is to give them what they took. Wholeness. The identity that is theirs in Christ Jesus.
This thing they did to you. It wasn’t about you. It was about the need in their own hearts. I know that’s unfair. I know it’s not justice, but they cannot give you justice. In forgiveness we sometimes wait and wait for them to give the thing they took back to us, but forgiveness isn’t dependent on them replacing and restoring. It is dependent only on Jesus, who gave his life for this very scenario you are in currently.
I’m not advocating for a world with no boundaries. Not at all. Walls exist for a reason. This is also not advocacy for denial. You can continue to acknowledge how their actions damaged you. Most of all, I’m not advocating for a world in which people are not held accountable for ill behavior. The Lord has been clear that his anger is alive and well. He is not slack concerning his promises. His law stands.
This is simply to say that we have taken into our hearts this truth, which enables forgiveness.
My God will supply all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
I don’t have a map for you, just this one piece of advice. Put a pin in this verse above. Meditate on it. Tell the Lord how you feel, and tell him your fears, and delight in his rich, free, and inexhaustible forgiveness for you. Jesus finished his work, so that his work could be finished in us and bring us to healing and restoration and redemption. It is love that carries the day, every time. Without it we are actually nothing. With it, we have everything.
This fear of identity we’ve had, that we will not be enough (and on the flip side too much) is something the devil tries to prove endlessly. He is always accusing, and tempting us with the idea that we will never be centered. We will never find peace, and we will never be worthy of true love or honor. The fight of forgiveness, is the fight of knowing truth. Who are we without Christ, and then, who are we in Christ. If there’s one thing that sums up the Christian fight it is simply knowing God, and knowing who we are in a world who seeks to strike down who God is, and what that means for us in light and truth. Knowing that we are loved from everlasting to everlasting. Sin cannot possibly restore us, it operates on a fragmented understanding of self based on self-value, not God-love.
I heard something recently in a podcast which I’ve been chewing for days. It was a lady who has had a severe, chronic illness for years, and she has prayed for that long for God to change her health. She says she has learned to pray first that God will fill her need for security, her need for love, and her need for joy. She still prays for deliverance and health, but through drawing close to Christ in desperate places she has learned the secret to thriving in any and all circumstances: she knows where she stands with God.
I pray to forgive and become whole again, but more than that I want to know and delight in my God. I want to be joyful and in love with life. My end goal is not forgiveness, it is the journey I am taking to knowing God. With this focus, I don’t fear the tides of anger. I’m not a Calvinist, so for the reasons above I don’t credit God with my misfortunes, but neither do I believe that he is ignoring me, or weak.
For this reason, anger keeps me curious. Who is this God who works far above the way I work? What is this truth that brings suffering ones like me peace beyond understanding? What is this power that works so differently from my notions of power? I do not understand the way forward, but he is my Way so I trust him.
In the deeps of the ocean is a steadfast love, unwavering and true. It doesn’t fear anger, and will not change love. I have placed my hope in Jesus, not in the unreliability of mankind. Sin compromises us, but we have hope because our hearts of stone are being changed with soft, living hearts. Sin exploited my needs, but Jesus is fulfilling them. I forgive because that is who I am.
Love,
L. Raine
