1. God's love is an infinite source and is given without measure when we draw upon it.
2. If a person has done evil to me and comes to me for forgiveness, their current state of repentance (changing the way they think and act) means more to me than whatever happened in the past. God put us in a world with a monotonic dimension of time for a reason. I believe part of that reason to be that, as our conscious minds live on the cusp of time as it happens (at the crest of the wave), God is making a point that the present time has vastly more importance than the past (recalled) or the future (imagined). If someone is asking me for forgiveness, their present state has a far greater "weight" than any past state in which they have done evil, and so forgiveness is easy.
3. The very fact of someone's admitting they made a mistake is usually cause enough for me to forgive the person before they ask. One of my strongest attributes, to which I've paid a great deal of attention developing over the years, has been the culturing of a compassionate heart. Compassion goes a long way in our life here on this earth, to say the very least.
4. Close to compassion is empathy, the ability to put oneself in the other person's place and feel as that person feels. When you've walked enough miles in your own shoes, you start to find more situations in which you recognize -- if not a person's actual situation, at least the flavor and power of -- that person's emotional state. Sometimes, being able to switch perspective, to understand (in your own way) why someone might have acted as they did, helps make forgiveness easy.
5. I try with all my heart to follow, and thus come closer to understanding, Jesus' commandment to love my enemies as well as my friends and to consider every human being a child of God.
And yet my heart remains hardened toward just one person, the single person in my life I have never forgiven and, in my current state, cannot forgive. If I go through the list above with regard to this one person, here's what comes out.
1. God's love is limitless, but God's love through me simply does not extend to this person. My limitations do not allow it to reach far enough.
2. and 3. As probably doesn't need to be stated, this person did me high-amplitude damage, but this person never admitted wrongdoing nor came to me and asked for forgiveness in earnest, but only with absolutely transparently false tears, all as a tactic of manipulation.
4. I have tried repeatedly and yet have not been able to put myself in this person's place. I simply cannot understand how someone could act as they did; I surely cannot imagine myself doing as they did.
5. There is no love in me for this person. I can admit, on an intellectual level, that they are a child of God, but still my heart is stone cold.
Last, as this person is dead, there is no hope of interactive, human reconciliation. I don't foresee any hope of reconciliation without divine intervention of some sort, for which I actually do hold a pilot-light-sized hope in a faraway corner of myself.
My spouse believes that I do not need to forgive this person. My last therapist was an atheist and did not help at all because he simply could not fathom, in the end, the depth of my need to forgive because it's a manifestation of my hunger to draw closer towards God.
I know that I do need to find forgiveness for this person because the lack of it, I feel, is actively keeping me from drawing closer to the Father. I can walk (or stumble, as the case may be) in some semblance of alignment with Him, as a compass aligns to the magnetic orientation of the earth (ever slowly, and often not quite rightly due to the influence of other, nearer fields), but my distance from Him cannot close any further until I can forgive. It's as though I have to stay a certain radius from the source of the Light, no matter the direction in which I try to travel to "get around" and get closer.
I feel that I could be ready for the next step in my calling should I be able to resolve this issue. Sometimes it feels as though the only thing keeping me limited to my level is my inability to resolve it.
Feeling His light and warmth, drawing as nearly as I can and reaching out as far as possible, I hear His voice saying to me -- with this brilliant, ever-enduring, all-pervasive and depthless love, almost as quietly as to be a whisper, just barely voiced:
No.
Not until I'm able to forgive.
It feels as though I could run up even into Jesus' arms if just this barrier were removed. How I could walk in the spirit! How I could be this force of God's love in this world! Almost. Almost. So very close it hurts, it aches desperately, it makes me cry; it feels like it's killing me.
Now into the early morning of Saturday: just as you can sense another person's eyes on you even not knowing exactly where they are, I feel the Creeping Sunday begin to draw near.
Will this be my week?
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Your spouse feels inescapably compelled to elucidate.
ReplyDeleteWhat you have to understand is that I have no greater priority than to spare you pain. Nevertheless, what I said is true, even if partly motivated by love and a desire to ease suffering. I don't think you *need* to forgive the person in question. You are someone so preternaturally suffused with compassion that, like Daisy Gamble, you could probably make flowers grow just by looking at them. If there is just one person, someone who has hurt you immeasurably and irremediably, whom you cannot now find it possible to forgive, then I think Jesus, whose understanding and forgiveness surpasses human understanding (and even your own empathy), and who knows you as a human, who knows every corner of your soul, could not fail to understand and to forgive your own failure to accomplish an emotional broadjump that would represent a truly superhuman achievement.
It is possible that, someday, you will manage even this prodigious step forward, but even if you don't, the loving God who forgave even Peter his perfidy, could not fail to accept this one very human limitation in a case so extreme, that to ask you to overcome it would be tantamount to asking you to sprout wings and fly. God would not ask you to do that.
But knowing you, I do not think it impossible that you will someday find it in yourself to manage.
P.S. 03/17/09
ReplyDeleteWith much prayer, this issue was indeed resolved (post: Treasure Revealed). It needs to be said that I did not find it in myself to manage, but rather I found it waaay outside myself -- only through God -- to manage.
I thought it would be more of a floodgate-type phenomenon when it happened, but instead it was more like opening up the door to a room full of great treasures, which now I get to go through and integrate to myself in a whole new way, one by one. Just as wonderful as the floodgate method, but much more slow-going.
For the believer, miracles simply never cease. Glory to God in the highest, and peace to His people on earth!