Saturday, January 13, 2007
Finding a route through unforgiveness
It's strange - over the past few months, I have been experiencing a sense of "grief" over the loss a close friendship. What added to the burden was the fact that the separation was precipitated by an offence committed against him through my own fault (one may even say stupidity). We have talked at length about the offence, and I have put forth so many sorries requesting for forgiveness, but to no avail. As with most conflict situations, the first offence often creates subsequent offences. Hence it was not a case of a one-sided offence.So what does one do when the other party cannot (or refuses to) forgive? Standby and wait? Or walk away completely? Through these unfolding events, I am learning more about the nature of forgivess, and what it means to be forgiven. Here's more...
- Forgiveness before God first. For me, I felt that I needed to stand before God to ask for forgiveness first. It's not merely about the wrong that one has done and the hurt caused. Because the first fruits of repentence need to stem from standing before God first, and asking for forgiveness. We can feel sorry because of many reasons e.g. to remove guilt just to make us feel better. These do not result in us clinging closer to God, but rather, to focus on self away from Him.
The desire for vindication. Here, the element of choice needs to be rigorously exercised - choosing not to retaliate, choosing to protect the other person's reputation, and choosing to preserve the other person's freedom without trying to manipulate the circumstances to "make it better". If bitterness and resentment grows (by us taking vindication into our own hands), what is at stake is who we ultimately become. We can follow the path of Christ, or towards the path of barrenness.Protecting our walk with God. Satan is all to happy to use a conflict situation to start tear down what God is doing in our lives; he may use the words of common friends or bystanders to the situation to discourage; or try to convince you that to disqualify yourself from the race because you blew it. Here, one needs to choose God (and His Kingdom's purposes in you) above all adversarial messages thrown at you; and in many ways, ignoring the voices of guilt in order to press through - Only when one abides in the Lord's strength can one maintain resolve - "to walk and not faint" as the bible puts it in Isaiah.
Responding in love. In broken relationships, there will be a desire to not want anything good for the persons involved for something they have done (or not done). Instead, God calls us to not only not retaliate, but to not withhold good from those who have offended or hurt us. It is during times like these when our sacrifices and obedience to God costs something and authentic.
Again, only when one abides in the Lord's strength can one maintain resolve. Our natural instincts and notions of what love is often not the kind of love God calls us to towards. We learn only as we obey - there is no way otherwise. In matters with people, our hearts learn in doing what our minds can only theoretically comprehend.
Discerning the right time to walk away. It can be very human for us to protect ourselves from further hurt and make a decision to walk away from a conflict situation. It is probably right to say that there has to be a time when one needs to stem the 'bleeding', but that time needs to be determined by God's leading and not merely our reaction to hurt.
Ecclesiastes 3 says, "... a time to embrace and a time to refrain, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak..." -- that is no doubt true, but the "time" mentioned in these passages can only be fruitful, and in some cases redeemed if it's fully given to the Lord for His keeping. If it is indeed the right time to walk away, God needs to first give us the release in our spirit. This was what I sensed this week: that it was right (and the right time) to close the door and walk away.Differentiating between unforgiveness and reconciliation. In the end, there needs to be freedom and liberty with all parties involved. We should not continue to be in bondage to resentment and unforgiveness. However, whether there should be reconcilition, remains another matter. Unforgiveness remains the shackles that bind us. So forgiveness is mandatory from God's perspective. Reconciliation, on the other hand, is what we can do after we are free. For instance, from a Christian perspective, a wife who has decided to walk away from her physically violent husband needs to forgive her husband. But whether there can be authentic reconciliation is dependent on whether her husband changes his ways. Sometimes, there is no desire for a future relationship, and to not be reconciled is necessary to preserve freedom.
Someone once said: Our deepest longing, our greatest hopes, our very cherished relationships, our most vigorous pursuits, and our most condemning weaknesses - all need to be subjected to the all encompassing person of Jesus Christ. Where you fix your eyes, there is who you will become.
Indeed, Christ will take the fallout from broken relationships if we let him, and then we are free to move on. But the point is that we have to move on - sometimes that means that one should be prepared to walk away unreconciled (with our conscience clear before God of course). Relationships that do not break will be stronger. On the other hand, relationships that do break and do not mend should not be a burden that ties us down. We continue to run the race.
Labels: Forgiveness, Friendships, Relationships
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