Through the years, as I was willing to listen (and I admit I was not always willing) God taught me many things that have given me strength and brought me to a place of peace.
Forgiveness is difficult because it involves emotion and action. The action of saying “I forgive you” is not as difficult as making the words a reality in your heart.
I was wounded many times by people to whom we had reached out and sacrificed our own finances and comfort to help. People to whom I had shared my heart had betrayed me, and people who had promised they would be there for us had disappointed us.
I came to recognize there was really no one that could be counted upon to be there when we needed them, no one, that is, except God. People are fallible and so can be counted upon to fail us. I was no different.
One particularly painful day after experiencing one of my earliest rejections, I was struggling with this concept of forgiveness, so I called out to God. I knew that I was supposed to forgive, and I wanted to do that, but I just could not get my emotions to line up. “God, how do I forgive?” I asked. God did not answer me by giving me a magic Scripture verse or series of words to say, but through the years, He showed me the meaning of this most powerful act.
At one church, we had a group rise up against us and split the church. Church splits are as old as the church itself. They will be with us everywhere we find people who would rather be right than reconcile. In the process, of course, many people get hurt. Many forget that the pastor and his wife are usually hurt the most.
This time, one of the people who decided to leave was a very dear person to our children. I knew that we needed to let them know what was going on before they heard it from another source.
We tried to be very careful to tell the truth without making the people who were causing this disturbance into monsters in our children’s eyes. Later that day, my oldest child came to me and said these words: “I have made a decision today. I am not going to remember that person by this one unkind action but I am going to remember her by all the good times we had together.”
That day, I knew I had been given one of the main keys to forgiveness by my own little girl.
If we were to put the actions of the people we serve into percentages, we would most likely find that the hurtful actions are a very small slice of the pie. Our problem is that pain gets our attention more readily than pleasure.
Paper cuts, though very small and insignificant, hurt a great deal. When we focus our attention on the paper cuts that others inflict upon us, we are not able to focus on what is good. I will admit that not all the hurts inflicted on us are paper cuts, but the principle still applies.
Another time when I had been deeply wounded by a congregation of people was just at the time that the movie The Passion of Christ was being shown.
