I forgive you. I read those words, and I wonder what they truly mean. My little brain struggles to wrap itself around that phrase because it feels so foreign. If you give it a moment I think you’ll realize, as I do, that there are the little hurts – the person who bumps into you on the sidewalk without apology, and then there are the enormous, deep wounds that seem to never heal: the person who rips away the life you’ve built or the life you’ve imagined for yourself. Are there levels of forgiveness? Degrees? I’ve asked this any number of times, and the answer always the same, the one I’ve railed against again and again to no avail: “no.” Instead, the command is simply to forgive – period, end of sentence.
I’ve been silent for a very long time; I’ve left you without excuse. You see, I’ve been wrestling with demons (literally if you believe in them, and if you don’t maybe you should reconsider), that haunt my days and terrorize my nights. Deep inside my soul, I knew that there was nothing inside me to say to you that would lift you up into that higher plain that I so long for us both to inhabit. And then I realized that lifting you, well, that simply wasn’t my job. Instead, I have been tasked with telling you the truth – all of it. The truth is, I love you – even when you feel your most unlovable, your most ugly and scarred. I FORGIVE you (whatever you think that means); I don’t care what you’ve done or contemplated doing. My answer is always going to be the same. Nothing will separate my love for you, from you.
It certainly isn’t my love or my power that allows for this forgiveness. Goodness, I’m human, and I have buried within me the mess of this world. Instead, it’s His command and His ability – a gift working within me. We are to live with one another the way He would live with us– continually, connected, unbroken. So, here’s my question, and I think perhaps it doesn’t need to even be asked, but ask I will: do you feel broken? Don’t answer right now. Contemplate, I often do; truly, it’s His gift to us, this meditation on His word. And then there’s nothing to it but to find yourself (myself), prostrate on the floor (read that as ‘on your face’), begging for it end. He hears; he answers. He’ll always answer you. If you have doubt, please know that it’s He promise to us to never leave or forsake us. That’s a promise that I’ve found that most people can’t make or keep, because we’re human, but He does.
I’m going share a story. True it is, but pretty it is not, and if you think less of me because of it, I understand. I had not been holding His hand – mind you, He never lets go of ours. But, I, thinking(believing), I could do better on my own, let go of His grasp. I stopped reading His word, I stopped praying; I refused to find a church. And I plodded along. Just little ol’ me. And my world, as it so often does when we fail to hold Him close; came apart at the seams’; no Gorilla Glue was going to fix the mess in which I’d found myself embroiled – no, change “embroiled” to created.” And I wanted desperately to have this life end. I found myself on my knees, then on my face, begging Him to bring me home to where pain and suffering don’t exist, only His glory and radiance and goodness.
As I am writing this, I’m sure you can guess the outcome of that particular prayer. I won’t lie and say that sometimes I don’t wish he had acquiesced. But there are things He showed me: chiefly, forgiveness I needed to offer to people close to me that I had believed had in some way, wronged me. The problem lay not in their behavior, but in my response. No matter how they received my love and forgiveness (because love, is, after all, the foundation of forgives), I found myself, tears streaming down my face, holding out my open hands to Him to fill with the Love, peace, with (you guessed it) forgiveness that I just didn’t (don’t) possess.
I’m not a finished product. We never are until He consents to bring us to His glory, but I am His, and He is mine. That’s enough – will always be enough, and if I forget, please love me enough to remind me.
1Peter 4:8
The Unexpected Life 