forgiveness

Forgiving is central to the teachings of Jesus, and to the life Jesus lived, which is way of saying the same thing.

Years ago I learned the dirty little secret about nursing grudges. And it is truthful to talk about them like this. Nursing them. Because the natural thing to do is forgive someone and get back to living. The difficult thing to do is exert the psychological effort to remain in a state of offence. This is not easy to do without being supernaturally endowed with evil intent—something that comes easily enough to fallen creatures. It’s easy to see how this is true. Just look at the lines on someone’s face and the weariness in someone’s body who has been holding a grudge against someone for years. How tiring. Anyway, like I said, the dirty little secret about nursing grudges is that I think I’m holding something against someone, but really it’s the something that is holding me.

But there is an underlying assumption that forgiving is this small thing that yields big results, that it’s some kind of secret weapon that you get issued to you once you become a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or some other religious person. But the idea is not that forgiving is easy for anyone to do, though. In fact what a lot of people believe is that forgiving, simple and powerful as it may be, requires that you exert a lot of work to get over all your junk first, so that you can finally do the simple act of truly forgiving.

But I’ve been thinking that forgiveness itself is work. It’s not at all that you say, "I forgive you" over and over, even if you don’t feel it, to convince your soul of the already reality, to convince your heart to accept it and live like it’s true. Fake it till you make it will NEVER work.

The thing I’ve been thinking is that you have to do the work of forgiveness. Where you begin is with the determination to do the work of forgiveness. As surely as you would wake up one summer day and determine that today is the day to dig that trench, you would wake up one summer day and determine that today is the day to forgive that sin. But the determination is not the work. Once you determine to do it, you roll up your sleeves and start digging. This is quite backwards from the other way. Instead of starting with the act of forgiveness and then repeating the words over and over to convince yourself that you’ve already forgiven someone, you set out with forgiveness as the final goal and accept that there will be a process, and that process will require effort. You don’t assume that the work is already done just because you say it’s done. You don’t have slaves to do your work. You can’t contract this out. You have to do it.

If you dig a trench you know when it is done. You can see it. But how do you know when you’re finished forgiving someone? I think you can’t really know by counting to 490 or by setting some arbitrary goal. I think you don't know until the trench finally breaches the bank, channeling the river of life into your fields, returning the scorched earth to a verdant garden teeming with new life, and making a place to walk with God in the cool of the day.