Thoughts on Forgiveness

Well, I was visiting my half.com account today (for those of you who aren't familiar, this is a part of ebay where people buy and sell movies, music, etc.) to make sure that my rating (given by other customers) was still good. I also happened to be checking on the rating of someone I had purchased from. He had made an unfortunate mistake with his catalogue and so had a long listing of complaints (some very cleverly worded). One of these complaints read "To err is human, but to err constantly is NOT!"



If only it were so. And yet, I find that my humanness (at least one side of it) has me erring on a fairly regular basis (for example, I'm not sure that is the correct spelling or erring, or if erring is even a word). This is not to say that we must "go on sinning so that grace may abound"; a flawed logic and a sickness of the heart, but it does mean that we rely on a forgiveness that goes for 70 times seven and forever and ever amen. I wouldn't want to encourage people to make mistakes or to feel OK about making them, but I would say that to err, even constantly, is something we do. Praise God for His infinite grace. Not a cheap grace that simply allows us to get away with sin, but a convicting and costly grace that teaches us to get it right in an entirely new way. The world offers us the extremes of unapologetic sinning on the one hand and a casting of stones in the other. Christ's alternative was to offer forgiveness...and a call to sin no more.



Anne Lamott has a great quote which goes, "Not forgiving someone is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die." So easy to say and yet so hard to comprehend, let alone practice.A bit of a confessional here. My brother and I have not always gotten along. In fact, our relationship got so volatile that, at one point, we stopped speaking for 8 years. Not a pretty place to be, but such was our reality. About four years into this 8 year hiatus I was studying as a theology student in college. On one particular day I received back an ungraded essay with only one remark left by my professor; "you are more cynical at age 20 than I have ever been in my life." I thought that was a bit unfair, so I went to see my professor. We talked for quite awhile and I discovered that maybe he was right, and that maybe there was a solution to my problem. And that, like most Biblical answers, it would be ridiculously simple and incredibly complex. I would have to forgive.



God says that we cannot love Him and hate our brother. For a long time I thought of this as an arbitrary rule. My sophomore year of college, I discovered that is less a rule and more a reality. Its not that God won't allow it, it simply can't be done. Trust me, I've tried it. The more I harbored hate for my brother, the less room there was to love God. I clung to the rules that God had given, but without the relationship, I came up empty.



I hate to admit it, but when I made this discovery I almost gave up on being a Christian. I was willing to concede that I couldn't be a God lover and a brother hater, but I wasn't sure I could let go of the hate I had. If there was even a chance my brother might end up in heaven, I wasn't sure I wanted to go there.Getting over this was not an easy process. The first step was the hardest and the most important. It wasn't a step like in a 12 step program, it was simply the first step towards home. I assumed that I had been "slaving for God all these years" but I didn't realize that until I joined the party I wasn't any closer to home than my brother was. So I took that first step.



I began to pray for my brother. This was an amazing experience in the power of prayer. I had always believed that prayer that isn't pure cannot be heard. My initial prayers were perfunctory, I didn't love my brother any more than I ever had and I didn't want to see him change or believe he could. Of course, it wasn't him who changed. Little by little, through nothing more than daily prayer (to use the words "nothing more" is almost blasphemous) I began to have a change of heart. The actual phrase "change of heart" took on new meaning. It was like a surgery, my old heart pried out and replaced with a new heart, Christ's heart. With his heart pumping I could see with his eyes, hear with his ears, move with his spirit. It was a powerful transformation.



It was also a long and slow one. This wasn't overnight. It wasn't over weeks. This was at least a year, and it was bits at a time. Patience was just one of the fruits of the spirit that grew in me. God's love and kindness brought me joy and peace. One led to another and I became a new man.And patience begat patience as I forgave my brother but discovered that our lost contact meant lost addresses and lost phone numbers. I was ready to forgive my brother, but couldn't find him.



What I didn't know was that he was undergoing a similar transformation and was not yet ready to forgive or be forgiven. But within a few years, we were put in touch through a random meeting between a mutual friend that the world would call coincidence.



My brother and I speak on a weekly basis now. We still have things we work through with each other and in our own separate lives. But we don't carry around the burden of hate and resentment and life is easier because of it. When Christ says that his yoke is easy and burden is light, he isn't kidding. The cross he would have us take up every day is a relief compared to the sinfulness we might try to possess and find ourselves possessed by.



I read Anne Lamott's quote this week and thought "this lady speaks from experience, she understands that forgiveness is work but to not forgive brings death." When you swallow poison, the purge can be painful, but its a welcome substitute to holding it in. If you find yourself far from God and have someone you need to forgive, swallow your pride and upchuck your poison and see if you don't feel better when you're done. Christ has come that we might have life, and have it more abundantly. Why would we choose to stay sick instead? Given the choice between what's human and what's divine, go with what's divine. That is, after all, what we're created to be.