A couple nights ago, a friend called from Rochester. As we caught up on each other’s lives I asked about her in-laws. I’d been in a small group with her mother-in-law during a healing retreat. At the time her MIL had recently confronted her husband about his affair. She was in process of figuring out whether to stay with him or not.
It turns out they ended up divorcing. I never knew her husband, but based on what I’d learned of her that weekend, I could imagine it would have been difficult for her to choose to forgive.
As I thought about that situation, I had this thought about forgiveness:
In order to truly forgive, you have to die. You have to give up your right to be angry, bitter, or hurt, you have to die to your pride or self-defense. The reality is you DO have a “right” to those emotions because you were wronged. There is no forgiveness without death—that’s why it’s so difficult to do. None of us want to die. Volunteering for it seems highly counter productive. Yet the mystery at the heart of my faith is that without death there can be no life. Through death and then resurrection we can experience a new, deeper/higher, more joy-filled level of life.
I know that I’m struggling with places where my self-preservation/comfort instinct is at war with the need to just lay down and let God have access to my attitude. I KNOW how hard it is to forgive, but I’ve also seen amazing fruit in my life and in other’s lives when they were able to make that choice.
My friend’s MIL did the ‘logical’ thing: she didn’t die. So her marriage did. I can understand her solution, but I wonder what new marriage might have been born had she been able to forgive.
5 comments:
About a year after I graduated from HS, it became public knowledge that one classmate's mother had an affair with another's father. One couple divorced. The other couple reconciled. After years of not seeing much of either family, I now have the opportunity to see the reconciled couple on a regular basis. I have not ceased to be amazed that they were able to work through what happened and create a happy and healthy marriage. Seeing them often (almost always) causes me to give pause and wonder about the hard work, the death, involved in reaching the place they are today. I sometimes want to ask how they did it, for there must be things we all could glean from their experience, but I've yet to have the guts to approach such a sensitive subject.
... this post gave me pause. I have a hard time with forgiveness if the wrong is not acknowledged. Or it's only acknowledged with words but not with actions. On the other hand, my mom is queen of forgiveness and I don't know how she does it - in fact, it almost irritates me. I'm a bad forgiver and, I guess, I don't know how to let something die.
Thank you for giving me something ponder about...
Another thought....Corrie ten Boom has long been one of my favorite examples in forgiving...
Very thought-provoking.
I would argue, though, that just because you forgive someone doesn't mean that you are giving that person permission to continue mistreating you. You can let go of the anger and bitterness, but still say, "It's not okay for you to treat me that way." And sometimes that means the end of the relationship.
Rachel, that's a great point. I've heard it said that it only takes one to forgive, but two to reconcile. There are times when you have to walk away from a relationship, very true.
I have a finely honed self-preservation instinct that won't let me stay and be abused. That's part of what's made it hard for me to choose forgiveness, especially when an apology hasn't been made.
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