Lent 2023 Day 4 - Forgiveness Part 1

So.  

This is where stuff gets real, I suppose. I knew this was coming; it was what I was both excited and terrified about. When we got back into church… When I saw what the theme of Lent was going to be… When I decided to do this writing challenge… The day was coming that stuff was going to get uncomfortable, painful, awkward. I was going to reconsider just how committed I was to the whole situation.

Forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not a natural human tendency. Humans are more of “fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, I come at you like a rabid wolverine.” An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Twitter take-down for a Twitter take-down. Don’t get mad; get even. That’s human nature. 

The problem is … that doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work when it comes to my Christian faith. But it doesn’t work in general either. We have to learn to forgive. As far as Christianity goes, it is the central concept. It is essential. But it is … so … damn … hard. 

Today, we had our first service in our Lent forgiveness series. The story of the Prodigal Son. I love that parable. Seriously, it is one of my top stories in the Bible. If you just want to judge it based on its usefulness for sermons, it is top notch. You can approach things from so many different angles. And I can relate to every character at some point and do so for different reasons. Today, though, I related to the older brother. Which is uncomfortable, because he is usually the villain in the story. 

Quick David Reformed Version of the story for those of you in need of a recap. There is a wealthy man with two sons. The younger one is kind of a punk. He goes to the dad and says that he doesn’t want to wait around for the old man to die. So please, if you don’t mind, could you liquidate all of your resources and give me my half? The dad does. The young punk goes off to the Big Apple and goes buck wild. He spends his money on booze and drugs and whores. Then, one day, the money is gone. The party is over. The cautionary tale from the 1980s starring Michael J. Fox is in full bloom. The son ends up feeding pigs, wishing that he could eat the pig slop. He says to himself, “Self. Your dad has a lot of servants. And he pays them pretty well. Maybe I could go back there, ask for a job, turn in a jazzed up resume, get hired on.” He didn’t want to go back as a son - just a servant. So he heads back. The dad sees him entered the neighborhood and runs to him. The kid apologizes and asks for a job. The dad throws a giant party and restores the punk to son status. Yay. Except, not yay. The older brother is pissed. He finds out and mopes in the back yard instead of going to the party. The dad comes out and pauses the older brother’s emo playlist. The brother is all whiny, saying he has worked like a slave and never even got a tiny little fiesta. And now that no good punk brother came home and gets a party. The dad tells the brother to chill, because everything the dad owns will one day be the older brother’s. But that the younger brother is home, and he isn’t dead, so take off the eyeliner and change the Chemical Romance shirt and come inside to the party. 

Growing up in church, we are always taught to be like the father (who represents God, if you didn’t catch that). But today, I was struggling because I felt like the older brother. In fact, just yesterday I had been ranting about the very thing. Why? Why did this happen? Why was I rejected when I didn’t do anything wrong? What had I done that deserved that treatment? Cause I hadn’t done anything. I wasn’t “asking for it.” I was just being my usual cheery loving self, but that wasn’t good enough. And that wasn’t fair. 
It isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair. Lots of things happen to people who “don’t deserve it.” And I’m not going down that cliched annoying track that the Church loves to throw at people. “You deserve it. You’re a worm. You deserve so much worse that that. God is being merciful that you even have air.” Stop. Just stop that. Just understand that the best way to help someone who is hurting, who is suffering, is NOT to dump more blame, shame, guilt, awfulness on their head. That mindset is what leads to victim shaming and blaming. “What did you do that could have brought that about?” Let’s start with compassion instead? Anyway, now that I got that out of my system. 

As I’m meeting with my therapist and working through all of this trauma and abuse, I am uncovering issues that make things really hard. It is hard to know what to do with the person that caused the pain - especially if that person isn't alive anymore, which is an issue I have with several things. I have to recognize what actually happened, acknowledge the pain, identify the negative ramifications. But then I have to get to the forgiveness part. And that? Ugh. That’s tough. 

The sermon today was by Lucas. He’s one of the pastors at our church. I’ve gotten to know him over the last few months. I really love Lucas. He’s younger than me by a couple of decades. He was the first staff person I met there. We had coffee. It was at that point that I knew for sure we were in the right place. He is kind. He is genuine. He’s funny and smart. He cares about people. And we’ve developed a friendship for which I am extremely thankful. He did an amazing job today. There were several points that he made that I have had to perseverate about. 

Forgiveness is foolish. 
Yep. It is a foolish thing to do. Why is it foolish? 

It makes us give up the power we have over that person. 
We have the power to hold that thing against them. We have something against them. We have a commodity, a resource. We have a weapon that is uniquely carved against that person. And we want to use it. Oh my gosh, how we want to use it. That jerk that hurt us. And we want to get them back. Not only are we giving up that power but …

In order to forgive, we have to open the wound and clean it out. 
Now who the heck wants to do that? I’ve moved past things. I’ve come up with a way to function even with the pain. Why would I undo that coping mechanism? Why would I rip open the wound all over again? I am an expert on wounds. That’s a great thing to put on my resume. (Maybe that’s why I never get anything I apply for.) I’ve been wounded physically so many different times in so many ways. Broken bones, torn joints, stupid cuts. I wrote an entire blog post about my history of injuries, and there have been more since then. One time I went into a ravine to retrieve my son’s soccer ball. It had gone through a drainage pipe from our front yard into the ravine. As I traipsed through the lovely murky grossness, I stepped onto a fallen tree. Said tree crumbled beneath my feet, and I fell into the swampy goodness beneath. I got cut all up all over the place. And I got pieces of tree into places of me. I had shard in my side, one in my leg. So I had to clean up the different spots. But… there was one piece that I never really noticed? Or it got stuck under my stick in the initial incident? It’s still there. There is a tiny lump on my inner thigh a few inches up from my knee. If I poke it, it hurts. It has migrated since I inherited it, drifting down and over a few inches. I think it is trying to “work its way out.” But for me to get it out, I would have to cut into my leg and fish it out. It’s been there for like eight or nine years. It isn’t infected, just uncomfortable. But if it does ever become severe, I’m going to have to get it deal with. Forgiveness is like that. We have something buried under our skin. It is eating at us, hurting us. And we have to get it taken out. Which will hurt! And make us think about the original issue all over again. And why would we ever do that? It is so much easier to ignore us, or retaliate. But that doesn’t help, it doesn’t deal with the issue. We still are stuck with the foreign body. If we want to ever REALLY get better, we have to deal with it. 

The fact is that forgiveness may be foolish, may be uncomfortable, may be undesirable, but it is the only logical choice. To do anything else hurts us as much or more as anyone else. Gandhi (supposedly) said, “An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind.” And he is right. Because for every person whose eye we would come after, there is at least one that could come after us. No matter how loudly put on the cloak of the older brother and scream about fairness, I cannot pretend that I’ve never been the bratty younger brother. Looking backwards, trying to rectify all the wrong before forgiving, that keeps us focused the wrong way. I have been in that situation for a long time. And that is part of the process. I’m not saying that as soon as someone screws you over, you should just put on a happy face and act like nothing happened. That is even MORE unrealistic than trying to get to a place where we can forgive. People hurt us. They do it on purpose sometimes. And - one thing I have had to learn - is that it is OKAY to not be okay after that happens. And it is OKAY to not be okay for a while. This isn’t a “get over it, move on” situation. It is a “the long term goal is for me to get to a place where I can heal from this” situation. I’m open to forgiving. I’m willing to cut that wound open, clean it out, and move forward in a healthy way. 

We both serve a God who can make the desert bloom - Joseph Lowery
Forgiveness opens us up to a life that we never thought possible. We can experience so much growth and joy. The quote comes from a story Lucas shared about George Wallace on the 30th anniversary of the Selma march. It is a powerful story of repentance, remorse, restoration, and - yes - forgiveness.  It’s worth looking up. A man who was among the most vile of humans - allowing, enabling, instigating, encouraging awful racist behavior in Alabama - realizing he was wrong and spending years trying to make things right. I am sure many people didn’t want to forgive him. I still have trouble moving my image of him in my mind from the villain category, and I wasn’t even there. Churches love to bring up these stories of former Nazi prison guards, mass murderers, racists who recant their offensive beliefs and actions. They are usually used as examples to bash us over the head, telling us “that prison guard was a NAZI. How can you. not forgive your dad?” Lucas didn’t do that. He acknowledged that there were people there who didn’t want to forgive, who couldn’t. But there were some who did, who saw the benefit to themselves and others if they took those steps. It is inspirational - even if I may not be completely ready to do that right now in every situation. And I CERTAINLY am not telling anyone that they need to get over their abusive background. This is just one dude trying to figure things out. I knew it was coming. I’ll see how this all goes.