Forgiveness

Today Nathan was mad at Joel. Joel had broken Nathan's paddleball, and Nathan turned into Chief Thundercloud with an angry face and an unforgiving heart. My immediate thought was, "Good grief! That silly thing cost less than a dollar. We can certainly replace it." But my next thought was how it was more important for Nathan to learn to forgive his brother.

Forgiveness. I'm learning about forgiveness, too. It's not easy to forgive ... esp. when someone has hurt you and cut you to the very core. I mean, paddle balls are important (esp. to little boys), but infidelities and breaking sacred vows are obviously on a totally different level. How does one even begin to forgive someone for that?

Quite frankly, at this stage in the game I am finding that every day it is a choice for me to forgive Matt. Some days ... more days than I like ... I feel very bitter and angry towards Matt. My heart is like a heavy stone that is unable to be moved. On days like this, I try to remember that I have a choice. I can choose to live life behind the stone, trapped in a tomb of darkness that is as cold as I am bitter. Or I can choose to allow the One who has already moved away the stone that sealed the tomb to move my stone of anger, allowing me to bask in light that contains more joy and peace than I could ever imagine.

It's a choice. Sometimes I have to make the choice to forgive over and over and over again each day. It's a mantra: "I forgive him. I forgive him. I forgive him." Over and over and over in my head, hour after hour after hour, day after day after day. Some days its specific. I forgive him for choosing Secil over me. I forgive him for leaving our children. I forgive him for the ugly emails and the horrible things he said about my character. I forgive him for telling me that I didn't deserve my wedding ring. Sometimes I find myself extending a more general forgiveness to him because the pain he cause me is so layered and complex that one pain is tied directly to another which is the immediate cause of a third and so forth.

It's been a year since that ill-fated NC trip. I returned home with a mind and a heart that was so wrapped up in pain that I couldn't see or think straight. Last fall and winter is a blur to me. I was dead to the grief. And with the spring my heart begin to stir again ... with an anger that burned and raged like nothing I'd ever felt before. Even then, I knew I had to forgive. That's what 2008 has been for me ... a year of learning to forgive.

There is a Sara Groves song about forgiveness, and part of the lyrics read like this:

I will not let that bitter root grow.
I will not let it leave that legacy.
But it gets so hard when the pain is all I see.
Every time I find healing you're making a new mess,
I am learning the real meaning of forgiveness.
I could move and never send you a forwarding address,
Or I could learn the real meaning of forgiveness.

The real meaning of forgiveness ... I'm not there yet, but I'm learning every single day. I hope and pray that at some point in the future, I can honestly say that I have forgiven Matt for all he has done to me and the kids. But for now, forgiveness is certainly a daily, and often an hourly, choice that I make, for I do not want that bitter root to grow in me.

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." (Matthew 18: 21-22)