Lent Day 25: Forgiveness Part 4

We really dislike our neighbors. Not all of our neighbors - we honestly don’t know any of our neighbors … like in the entire neighborhood. We aren’t the kind of people who spend a lot of time getting to know the people all around us. We never have been. I couldn’t even tell you the names of anyone who lives around here. Except … ironically … the people directly across the street. These are the people we don’t like. We didn’t set out to not like them; we were perfectly content to just ignore them like we always do. Throw up the hand wave through the car window thing. But that didn’t happen. We were annoyed by them early on because or their cars. They have like two dozen cars that park in their driveway … and in front of their house. The HOA (in typical annoying HOA fashion) has all kinds of rules about cars, including the fact you can’t park in the street overnight. The people over there have many times violated that edict. But the big problem came about eighteen months ago. 

Our daughter was starting her senior year of high school. To alleviate the driving conflicts that had raised with our recent move, we got her a car. We had done this less than a week before school started. She had been driving for a while, and she is a great driver. So we weren’t concerned about her taking on the responsibilities of a car. We hadn’t even gotten the car fully added to the insurance. She was running late, and the drive from our new house was even longer than the old place. So she backed out of our driveway a little too quickly. As usual, the dude across the street had his work van parked in the driveway with the back hanging into the street. Our driveways are lined up exactly across from each other. THUMP. She backed into the back of his van. This is the first day of school, first day back in person after a year and a half of virtual school. She was a wreck. (No pun intended.) I went across the street and rang the Ring button. After a few moments, the man stumbled out. Apparently I had woken him up. I told him what happened and showed him the dent. It was not very large. Really, if I hadn’t said anything he would probably never have noticed. I am honest, to a fault, though. I asked him if we could exchange information, so she could go ahead to school. We live across the street; we aren’t going anywhere. He agreed. She left. We tried to get back to our days. 

Now, I know about the dreaded insurance boost due to a teenage driver. And I know how much that insurance will jump when that youngster has an accident. I got in a wreck my senior year, and heard loudly and clearly about the insurance leap. I was hoping that we could avoid that by just paying for the damage ourselves. It wasn’t much, so it wouldn’t be that expensive. The insurance bump would probably be worse in the long run. So I texted our new friend on Friday (schoolhad started in the middle of the week) to ask about paying for the damage. We didn’t hear back from him until late Monday afternoon. He wasn’t comfortable with that. I couldn’t talk to our agent, since this was so late in the day. The next day, I was working on my computer when the wife shows up at our door. I walked out and she began yelling at me. Seven days! It has been seven days and you have done NOTHING! I tried to talk to her, but she interrupted me over and over again. She said I was a horrible person, a terrible neighbor. That her husband had been kind enough to not call the police and let us work it out. That I had tried to cheat them by offering to pay for it instead - claiming there is no way I could have done that. I did NOT yell at her for her poor math skills or understanding of money. I kept trying to explain about how they didn't write me back. How the car had not even been officially added to the policy. How I literally could NOT file a claim because the car didn’t even freaking show up. She continued to yell at me. Threatened to call the police to drag my daughter out of school and impound her car. Finally, she stomped off back to her house. I slunk back into our house and immediately got onto the phone with our insurance company. It took close to an hour; they had to do some creative filing to get the claim started. I walked over to their house and brought all of the information. The man answered the door and the wife kept walking up and yelling - telling me she had my insurance company on the phone (wrongcompany, but whatever). I gave them the claim info, trying to work in the explanation that the woman didn’t let me finish.  Then I walked back over to the house. When I told Heather about this, I had to stop her from walking across the street and ripping into this woman. It wouldn’t do any good. I just said we need to let it go. 

There were many times when I imagined going over and yelling at them. Letting the air out of their tires. Signing them up for tons of bulk mail. But we just, for the most part, ignored each other. I didn’t tell my daughter what happened for about sixteen months. I told the boys because they wondered why I didn’t like the neighbors. Our second run-in with them came when Door Dash accidentally delivered food for the kids to the wrong house. The driver realized the mistake and went back to grab the food. The woman came out and screamed at the young man for … I’m not really sure what. Having the nerve to make a mistake? Taking the food away that wasn’t theirs? After another later run-in with them, I think the reason she was angry was because she wanted to claim the food. Another driver months later delivered our food to them. He sent a picture of it on their doorstep. We texted with the driver, and we went out to look for the food. It was gone. In the couple of minutes that we were talking to the driver, they had come out and grabbed the food that they knew wasn’t theirs. My usual gameplan is to avoid interaction with this couple. I sure wasn’t going to pound on their door and accuse them of stealing our food. 

This morning, we were getting ready to go to church. We got in the car and started to back out of our driveway. A car whipped around the road in between our house and the jerk neighbors. It stopped directly behind us. The man got out and looked over at our car, halfway down the driveway with our reverse lights on. Then he slooooowly ambled into the house. After a couple of minutes, he came back out with the keys to his work truck. Leaning inside, he grabbed a bundle of cords. He locked the truck, strolled back to his car. He climbed in, and they sped away. The woman had been sitting in the passenger seat with her usual sour scowl on her face. We were incredulous. They knew we were backing out! He looked directly at us! He could have pulled the car up another few feet, so we could get out. Now we were agitated about the interaction the whole drive to church. All of those terrible experiences with those clowns came racing back, making the current one even worse. We had done nothing to them! It … was … an … accident. We tried to make things right. We apologized. We did everything we could to fix the situation. And we were not escalating this conflict; we just ignore them completely. They are the ones who keep giving us the stink eye, parking in the road, stealing our food. We were ticked.

You can guess what happened next. The sermon today was about “What to do with an apology.” Right off the bat, the opening prayer has one of the pastor praying about how some of us are holding grudges … we both actually laughed. It was a tremendous sermon. And like the whole rest of the series, it was VERY difficult. It is very interested how much can be preached about forgiveness. Each one of the sermons have had a lot of overlap. I mean, on the face of thing, the concept is quite simple. Someone hurts you, they say they are sorry, you forgive them. Or you hurt someone, you apologize, they forgive you. The actual process is not hard to understand. The problem is DOING it. Our head can grasp it, but our heart doesn’t want to do it. 

The pastor used the passage in Genesis 50 where Joseph’s brothers come to him. Let’s turn to that story in the New David Standard Version. So Joseph was an arrogant little turd. He was the most loved child of his father Jacob. Like a fantastic father, Jacob was never shy about telling all of the offspring how much Joseph was loved. And, like a stellar brother, Joseph loved trolling his brothers by telling them he was the most loved. As you can imagine, it created a peaceful family environment where everyone felt loved and appreciated. The brothers got together and threw Joseph into a pit, you know, like anyone would do. And to make sure their father had his heart fully ripped out, they brought Joseph’s technicolor dreamcoat back to Jacob all ripped up and covered in animal blood. They told Jacob that Joseph was dead. There wasn’t DNA testing back then because they were stupid. So Jacob mourned his dead son. And the sons sold Joseph to a traveling band of monsters, who then sold Joseph as a slave in Egypt. He was a baller at whatever he did. So he worked his way up the ladder of slave rankings. He ended up being the head “prisoners with jobs” in all the land. Pharaoh started having some really troubling dreams about cows and corn stalks. Nobody could tell him what they meant, not even the professors of Dream Theory at Cairo University. Pharaoh got up and started rapping. “Outnumbered, outplanned. We gotta make an all out stand. Ayo, I'm gonna need a right-hand man.” Joseph correctly guessed that the terror of the week was going to be widespread famine, so he was given the position. He led Egypt through the famine due to his amazing spreadsheet skills. The famine affected his homeland, so his brothers came to Egypt to beg for food. After jerking them around for a while with some really mean pranks - to prove that the brothers weren’t still jerks - Joseph told his dad and brothers who he was. There was a great reunion show aired on government television. Jacob and his massive clan relocated to Egypt, setting up the inevitable sequel Exodus. Eventually, Jacob died. The brothers worried that Joseph now would take his ultimate revenge since their dad wasn’t around to stop him. They went to Joseph to tell him that. He burst into tears and said that he would never hurt them. That what they did was really a douche move, but it had to happen or he couldn’t have helped save the family from the famine. Everyone hugged and they went to the credits. Halfway through, there was a mid-credits scene where Pharaoh’s son grumbles to his best friend about how profitable the children of Israel are on Egyptian land. He then tweaks his eyebrow up and says they had better watch their backs. 

So Joseph is in an interesting position. I gotta be honest; I don’t know if I would have done what Joseph did. Well - what he did the second time. I always thought he was a bit of a dick when he first encountered his brothers. I know that he was“testing” them, but I feel like he felt a LITTLE bit of satisfaction at putting his brothers through the ringer. When this opportunity came up, though, he did the right thing right away. He could have thrown them out on their butts. He could have imprisoned them. There were no negative ramifications at play for him. He was Vice Pharaoh. Anything he said went. His father was dead, so he wouldn't even have to deal with the parental guilt trip. What his brothers did was AWFUL. Let’s not downplay this, like it was just some family squabble. They didn’t just steal his cloak or eat the last piece of strawberry pie or urinate in his body wash. They threw him in a pit and sold him as a slave. Their initial plan was to murder him; selling him into slavery was the BETTER option. They didn’t care what happened to him. They never planned on seeing him again. He went through HELL. Yeah, things worked out great. But think how much weight that would hold for you if someone hurt you even half as much as his brother hurt him. I don’t want to forgive the jackasses across the street, and all they did was yell at me and steal my McDonald’s and block my driveway. 

The pastor talked about how we have different responses available when we receive an apology. We can reject it, ignore it, question it, receive it. We can make the person earn forgiveness. Do they really mean it? Are they going to do it again? It reminds me of one of Gary Chapman’s Five Languages offerings. (He has like a hundred different variations. Five Pie Languages. Five Ice Cream Languages. Five Pie and Ice Cream Combination Languages) He talks about how everybody has a different way they apologize, and everybody has a different way they need to hear an apology. And - unfortunately - those don’t always match up. Some people will say they are sorry and feel like it never needs to be addressed again. Other people need to hear a promise it will never happen again. Or they need restitution. A lot of the problems that arise from apology and forgiveness comes from expectations. (A lot of problems with EVERYTHING arise from expectations.) As the harmed party, I imagine what the other party is thinking. Or I play out what will happen if and when the person finally apologizes. I do this ALL the time. I play through our showdown in my mind. I am always brilliant in my arguments and vicious in my teardowns. It’s that whole revenge fantasy thing that people do. We assume that the person will never actually apologize for what they did. But IF THEY DO! I’m gonna let them have it. I’m going to tell them all of the things I’ve been holding in forever. 

Have you ever had someone who hurt you a while back come to you later and shock you with an apology? Yeah, I haven’t either. I haven’t! I have a long list of people over the years who have hurt me. I allude to this frequently in these posts. Let’s just say, the jerk neighbor isn’t the first person who has ripped me to shreds. A couple of times the person who did that has come back to me and apologized right after. But if any time at all passes, the other person isn’t coming back to say squat. That’s kind of the expectation because that is what I have always experienced. If the person is really sorry, they are going to feel bad and want to fix things. They won’t be able to sit there for weeks or months without saying anything. So, they probably don’t care. Or they don’t think they did anything wrong. See what I’m doing? I’ve already written the story. I’ve played both parts of the discussion and decided what the other person is thinking. But I don’t know what they are thinking. I don’t know where they are in life, what they are experiencing. I should be more understanding because I haven’t always been this good-hearted and illuminated person that I am now. 

I already have mentioned in a previous post how I was a little … jerk … when I was younger. But that didn’t end when I hit my teenaged years. If anything, I got worse. As I got older, I got more sarcastic. I judged people. I thought I was better than other people because I was smarter or more versed in the Bible (pun to break the tension). I could be downright cruel. In college, I steamrolled over people. I would pick on them and embarrass them. I was a real a-hole. As I got older, those sharp edges got filed off of me. A lot of it was done by having people treat me the way I used to treat people. I didn’t like it. Another large part of it was that I began to realize why I did those things. I didn’t really think I was better than people; I actually thought I was worthless. So my vicious tongue was to tear down people to make myself feel better. I only received positive attention when I showed how smart I was, so I had to make myself look smart to be worth anything. I experienced so much criticism, heard so many angry words over my younger years that I created a shell to protect myself - that shell consisted of sarcasm and insults. I hate thinking back about who I used to be; I really don’t like that person at all. Fifteen years ago - which was twelve years after I graduated college - I felt very much like I needed to apologize to some people. I looked up some people from college who I knew I had been especially vicious to. I wrote to them and asked for their forgiveness. I got a mixed bag of responses. A couple of people said they appreciated it, but that it wasn’t necessary. A couple of people never responded. But one person said that it had meant a lot. When he saw my message, he wondered why I was contacting him because we had never been close, that I had always been mean to him. We didn’t become great buddies after this, but we still do keep informed of each other’s lives via social media. He had a choice in that moment. He could have questioned my motives or my sincerity. He could have ignored me, like a few others did. He could have lectured me about how badly I had hurt him. But he didn’t, and I’m thankful that we were able to repair things. I hope that if my neighbor ever does come over to apologize that I would be as gracious. I’m not sure if I would be. 

This whole study of forgiveness has been very useful in showing me that I’m not as far along as I think I am. Yeah, I’m a far cry from that acerbic little turd burglar wrecking havoc at UCF. But I still harbor a lot of dark places. I remember a LOT of wrongs that people have done to me. They hold far too much real estate in my brain. I really need to learn how to let things go. When I do receive apologies, I need to learn to actually receive that and work to restore that relationship. Even if I don’t receive the apologies I want, I need to forgive. That is something I need to and want to learn. And it definitely is something that will be addressed next week. That is the sermon that I’ve been waiting for - how do we forgive people who have died? I have lost a lot of people, and some of them definitely left before things were fixed betwixt us. So I’m looking forward to that. Thanks for hanging with me through this whole messy process.