She turned back toward me and the joy she was feeling at the game she was playing left her. Tears filled her eyes, and a frown filled her face as she whimpered out, “Daddy, Daddy, I’m sorry!” and then the tears began to flow as she repeated, “I’m so sorry, Daddy. Daddy, I’m so sorry.”
Now the pain that I felt is not near as bad as I opened my arms and my little girl fell into my lap and weeps. She begged for forgiveness, and I told her it was okay.
After a while, her joy was back, and we move on.
OH, (sigh) if forgiveness was always that easy, but it isn’t.
What makes forgiveness hard is, most of the time, it is not an accident that needs forgiving. Yes, sometimes it is an accident, but that we will discuss that later. How do we forgive those people who do not repent or worse rejoice in their actions?
I grew up in the church and always knew that we were supposed to forgive. I usually never had many problems. Then again what usually happened did not radically affect me. I became a minister and had to deal with all kinds of problems and people with issues some of which were directed at me, still no problems forgiving. Everything changed when I received the call from a family member who told me that my grandmother's death was suspicious and that the prosecutor said she was the victim of a serial killer.
I was shaken to the core. This was not hurt feelings or damaged property this was my grandmother, and everything was different. If you have not lost someone to a crime, then trust me it is different. I will discuss levels of pain and hurt in a different post. For those of you that feel you lost more than me, I will not diminish your pain by saying it was equal to mine. What I want you to understand is that for the first time, I did not want to forgive somebody, I wanted revenge.
Here I was a minister, a Bible teacher, a follower of Jesus who forgave more than I will ever have to, and I did not want to forgive.
Understand, I knew that I needed to. I knew the words of Jesus that said that if I refused to forgive, I would not be forgiven, but I also knew I could not do it.
I struggled with the thought of killing the person myself or at least volunteering to be the person to pull the switch for him to be electrocuted (I had forgotten that lethal injection was being used). I knew that this was wrong, and I also knew that I did not want to spend time in jail for doing it.
What could I do? I prayed and asked for help. I admitted to God that I could not forgive this man and I needed God’s help. This is where my journey to learn about forgiveness truly began.
I will share more next week but let me tell you this if you believe that you can just whistle and easily say, “I forgive and will forget it ever happened” don’t read this blog. Why? Because you don’t live in my world and personally, I’m jealous, because life was easier when forgiveness was easy.
What I want you to take away from this post is first, you don't have to feel like a failure because forgiveness isn't easy. The second is God will help you even when it is impossible.
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