Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Fluent in forgiveness

As a pilgrim I met along the way, who is in "A Way to Forgiveness" says - forgiveness is like learning a language. The more you do it, the easier it comes. I liked the way he put that and it was helpful to me then and still strikes me when I watch the film with a new audience.

At a screening on Saturday, there was a question during the Q&A portion that led me to think about people who I know just a little who have done something to hurt me. I realized that I haven't taken the time to forgive them because those people mean so little to me. When someone you love hurts you, I think that the love can compel you to try to forgive. Without great love, there is not great hurt, and not a great desire to right the relationship.

If you are forgiving mostly for yourself - to let go of pain and heal - then maybe you don't need to forgive those people. But the call to forgive is to repair relationships. This doesn't mean every time you forgive, there is reconciliation and the relationship will go back to what it was before. It means that when there has been hurt, there is a brokenness that needs to be tended to. Even if that person means very little to you and thus the hurt may be smaller and the desire to forgive may be small, there is still some brokenness. Should that not be repaired?

What about a perfect stranger who does something to you? Presumably you don't love that person (any more than you love any person just for being human), so the desire or need to forgive would not grow out of the level of love. Instead. I believe that in those circumstances, the need to forgive increases with the level of the offense. If a stranger does something small, like cut you off in traffic, you can quickly forgive and it almost means nothing to you. But if they rob you or physically harm you, then there is deeper brokenness that will need to be addressed despite the lack of relationship.

I confess, I felt convicted in front of that audience on Saturday, realizing that as I spoke about how to forgive, there were people that I hadn't forgiven. We are called to forgive widely and often, to forgive loved ones and strangers alike.

So perhaps those offenses by people who aren't a big part of our life are the first lessons in this new language of forgiveness. Instead of sweeping them under the rug, we should deal with them so that we can be fluent in forgiveness when it is more strongly needed.

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