Treasure Revealed

Had a breakthrough on the forgiveness thing (original post). Many aspects of life suddenly have become amazingly easier. I'm also finding shorter pathways to kicking out demons when they try to come.

The person I forgave was an important influence in my childhood so with this new-found forgiveness has come this HUGE treasure chest overflowing with old memories that can now come back to me in a non-destructive form. I'd thought no good memories could ever come of my thinking back on that relationship, but now they're coming in droves! Songs and the words of some prayers and hymns start coming to my mind just about as soon as I start praying -- things I'd forgotten or suppressed for years. The memories emerge with this glow of love about them because the forgiveness I found for this person grew out of a new love for them through the Lord.

It's as though I'd been blinded to the good parts of experiences in that relationship before I could forgive the person, but now I see them -- they were there all along, of course, just my capacity to enjoy (or even perceive!) them had been squelched by the venomous evil with which that relationship was tainted. But there were good parts, and my mind is starting to shut down old pathways and start digging new troughs through which my thoughts can flow.

Heretofore, I'd only been able to remember the bad parts of the relationship and I know that, in order for my thought processes to change, there had to be something to replace the old pathways: a shunt to a new way of thinking. The catch with trying to change your thinking in this way is that the new thought absolutely must be more appealing to think of than the old one; no matter how hard I've tried, I've never been able to push thoughts down another path from behind but always have had to coax them out gently and lead them with a treat, as if holding a carrot in front of a tortoise on which I'm riding (or just holding a big piece of cake in front of myself; perhaps that's the better analogy).

Then good ol' GABA goes to work. Sy Rogers acutally impressed the heck out of me during a talk he gave by starting on about thought patterns and using the full name of this neurochemical: gamma-aminobutyric acid. If I recall correctly, it's GABA in the brain that suppresses the firing of neural pathways (I think glutamine is the corresponding antagonist molecule that stimulates neurotransmission, but I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment). So I would contend that not only do you need to shut down the old pathways but actively seek out new pathways down which the thoughts can flow and to make these the paths of least resistance (or greatest reward) to think about, so props to glutamine as well.

At any rate, just recall Luke 1:37 (ESV):

37 For nothing will be impossible with God.

That word nothing, traced to a Greek word, I believe, has to do with the freshly-spoken word. I'm still trying to tune in to God's freshly spoken words, but I think I'm making some headway there.

Praise God -- from whom all blessings flow!


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To Forgive

Generally speaking, forgiveness is easy, for a lot of reasons:

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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