Forgiveness: "Are you serious?"

Disclaimer:  Even though this is a blog about simplicity, this post is a long read.

Recently I realized that I had hate in my heart towards someone I had met with.  Each time I’ve met with this person, I leave with a bad taste in my mouth from something she says about me.  She is known for those little digs that are so expertly spoken that there is no outside damage, but later you realize you are internally bleeding. During the conversation with her, my spirit said, “ouch”, but I was not fully aware of what I was experiencing at the time. 

Later that night, just before seeing the movie “Dear Zachary” on Netflix instant, I thought, “I hate so-and-so.”  It just came to me more than 12 hours after meeting with her.  So many thoughts and feelings came to me:  entitlement, anger, hate, hate of my hate, guilt, frustration with having hate crop up, and even my fallback thought when confronted with hating someone, “I must pray for them.”  Ugh, I hate praying for people I hate. Hate it!  But somehow it always at some point comes up for me as the thing to be done. UGHUGHUGH!! 

I did a prelim, “God bless her” prayer but was not going to take the time in that moment to do much more because I was about to start the movie, and truthfully, was not at all excited about praying for her in the first place.

Well,  I was numbed by the events in the movie, though I do highly recommend it. “Are you serious?” is what I was left with at the end, not knowing who I was directing that question to.   God?  Hmm.  “Not too eager to chat with you because, well,  ‘Are you serious?!’”  My half-hearted prayer for the person I was hating on for simple nastiness did not even factor in compared to the issues in the movie. After the movie, I realize that emotionally I am living in luxury: routine nastiness, and having had a relatively easy life where I haven’t had very big things to forgive.

You see, the movie is about how to deal with horrible events, and horrible people, and what you do afterwards. 

I cannot shake the sense that each of us, solitarily ultimately (though thank goodness we have help along the way from friends, family, even strangers) has to call upon our lives to meet our Faith, and not just the other way around.  What I mean is that within the life that we each are given, we have to wring out of our souls the very stuff that our faith calls us to, especially when it is the very last thing that we want to do. 

I once spent 3 hours wrestling with making a promise to God.  I didn’t want to say the words of the promise unless I truly meant them, and I just did not want to say the words because the cost seemed too high.  I literally felt like I was giving away the very essence of who I knew myself to be, and I was not ready to do it.  So I spent 3 hours literally sick:  I had a headache, and was crying, raging, wiping away snot, pounding the floor literally, stomping, bargaining.  It was not pretty, but something was drawing me into that awfulness.   What was more awful:  doing it or NOT doing it?  For me, crossing such a line was one of the deepest acts of faith that I have done. 

It is the place that feels like we hit a wall.  We have to decide whether we will stay where we are or cross the line and move towards flicker of a vision of something else.  It is an awful place to be. You feel like if you do remain, you won’t be you anymore, but you feel like if you don’t, you are missing out becoming who you really are supposed to become spiritually.  For some situations, it is overt, as was my experience. 

Mostly in life though, it happens in small steps.  We have an experience, we feel upset or fear or hatred, and a part of us camps out there.   But I think if we are graced with the gift of not feeling perfectly at home in that place, though it is very comfortable and we feel we deserve to live there, we have a glimmer of a place beyond that comfort that beckons us if we dare listen.  The glimmer usually comes more than once, but it often comes but for an instant each time. Then if we repeatedly ignore it, it may stop showing up, and we change and find that we have to re-recognize ourselves because we have morphed into someone we do not want to recognize.

So back to forgiveness.  There are many roads to getting there, and it is often a very congested road full of potholes and bad weather, and besides we’re in a ratty clunker. We drive a few feet, and “Bam,” a thought comes in that leads us to hate and even vague thoughts of revenge.  So we stop to regroup, restart, and ”Pow”, we get hit from behind by a car we didn’t even see.  It’s like a bad cartoon, but it is our life. We know we are supposed to get there, but under such horrible conditions, we ask, “Is it really worth it?” We just want to go back home and crawl into bed.

 I remember a situation in which forgiveness was the last thing in my heart.  The situation was this.  I had arrived in a developing country as a missionary for what was to be at least a 2-year stint.  It was early on in my time there; I was working with a small traveling team. One American team member said something to me that silenced the whole team.  The room just stopped. Boom!  I was devastated by what he said to me, and everyone else was truly shocked.  Those who heard what he said to me later told me that they were convinced that I would pack it up and go home to the States. My spirit immediately felt irreparably crushed.

The very next day there was a large national meeting with the team, including my co-worker, along with a hundred or so other missionaries, pastors and church workers.  I spent much of the morning session in tears, and because the wound in my spirit was so deep and raw. I was truly unable to stop weeping so I had to excuse myself.  After that day, I started hating him.  But I knew that if I was to continue in my role as a missionary, I had to forgive and love him, which at the time seemed impossible and if possible, just too much work, and besides, he deserved nothing from me except coldness.  But in fact, I was reminded of a prayer I had made even before the incident that I needed to learn to love him, for he and I had not hit it off much from the start to begin with.  Each time I forgave him, it lasted but a second. 

I think that is why Jesus said we had to forgive “Seventy times 7.” I had so much trouble making my forgiveness stick that I started counted how many times I had forgiven him, thinking, “OK, I just might have to go through this 490 times.”  Within several weeks--I think by the hundred and somethingth time--I was done, but some things—like the unbelievable events in the documentary “Dear Zachary”-- probably require even more than 490.

Did you notice that in many ways forgiving someone is a lot like working out?  We know we should do it, it is hard to start and hard to keep at it. With both, it is hard to love the positive vision more than where we actually are, so a little well-placed fear helps: fear of who we will be if we don’t do the work.  Also some people forgive more easily than others, just like some people shape up more easily than others.  For some it is a longer process than for others.

So how do you forgive evil like in the movie?  I don’t know.  Start counting I guess, and pray.  It's kind of like exercising:  not my favorite thing but I like the results.