Monday November 7, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Learn the skill of forgiveness
Be on your guard! If your brother sins, rebuke him. And if he repents, forgive him. And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, “I am sorry,” you should forgive him.
I imagine we are all familiar with forgiveness. It seems so optional most of the time, even if the Lord’s Prayer includes an implied threat if we do not forgive.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
In Dr. McMillen’s famous book None of these Diseases, the author makes it clear that forgiveness is NOT optional.
The moment I start hating a man, I become his slave. I cannot enjoy my work anymore because he controls my thoughts. My resentment produces too many stress hormones and I become fatigued after only a few hours of work. The work I formerly enjoyed is now drudgery. Even holidays cease to give me pleasure. I cannot escape his tyrannical grasp on my mind. When the waiter serves me Porterhouse steak, it might as well be stale bread and water. My teeth chew the food, and I swallow it, but the man I hate will not permit me to enjoy the taste.” (p. 72)
Captain Kangaroo taught me to say please, thank you, and I’m sorry. He didn’t teach me to say, “I forgive you.” It’s difficult for Miles and Jasper to say the first three, and “I forgive you” is definitely a step up.
Forgiveness is not a way to be passive, or excuse someone’s bad behavior, or avoid confrontation. It is an assertive relational skill that requires practice, and that can be learned.
To forgive, it helps to have a path to follow:
- Be specific in my mind. What happened? Against what part of me? What were the consequences?
- Remember my own forgiveness. When I remember that, everything softens inside me.
- Arrange a time and place, and then tell the other person what offended me. Use notes from step #1.
- Tell the other person that I forgive them.
- Follow my words with action. My forgiveness must be unconditional, even if the other person does not accept it. Give up any false right to revenge.
Walter Wangerin, in As For Me and My House, shared that list and much more about forgiveness, which he learned on his own road of hard knocks:
Forgiving means:
    Giving up, stepping outside the system of law into the world of mercy.
    Giving notice, a clear communication to the other that you have been hurt, revealing as clearly as you can what the other person has done.
    Giving gifts, with no return whatsoever expected, focused completely on the one receiving the gift – the one who has hurt you.
And as you learn how, says Jesus, do it again and again and again.
(Titus 1, Psalm 24, Philippians 2, Luke 17)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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