People are more like horses than wolves.
In a town of small horses, your face is pressed right up on the mess your neighbor made. There’s not much galloping room. I grew up outside a town of about 10,000 souls; I know what it’s like to know everybody’s horse’s business, from cradle to grave.
I’m working on forgiveness. Speaker Jennifer Eivez says that we spend a lot of time teaching people how to forgive and that’s good; yet, we as Christians don’t spend enough time teaching those who hurt others to apologize and repent. I love peoples’ forgiveness testimonies at Friday night class at church— “Abundant Life.” We do forgiveness prayers and our pastors who are also friends in this small community— they stand in for our debtors and apologize. They dim the lights, in deep prayer we call out some of the things no one ever said they were sorry for.
I am sorry for how I have hurt you. I did not know how to love you. Will you forgive me?
It sounds like a hokey therapy exercise and it is not unlike things I have done in rooms where therapists and I processed my life before I came to Christ. Therapy helped me cope, but what happens at Abundant Life is a true release. I take the class for 2 winters, and when I drive home, my car feels small. My body yawns and sighs, letting whatever dark things in deep places release and scurry into the Columbia River Gorge. The muscles are an endocrine system all of their own and it is known we store things in our bodies.
God counts every hair on our head, wrote our name in the book of life, made great plans for each of us before we were born. He arrays us more resplendently than the balsamroot up 7-mile Hill road. In springtime in The Dalles miles of gold flow through our emerald green hills, surrounding our little tent. Our city.
Last spring, when I was angry at one particular person, I was having coffee at the local shop. This is a city of God's people, so the battle is going to be heavy here, my friend Ben said. We had been having a lighthearted conversation, discussing regional dialects of the East Coast. I sensed the hand of God on what he was sharing— it was so out of nowhere, this heavier utterance. We have to keep fighting the good fight, he said.
I’m choosing to forgive someone I don’t even know and doesn’t know me, but they hurt my family badly and injured my children. I know but struggle to remember; they were created for a purpose. To God, they are more beautiful, even in their darkest times, than all the lilies of the field, arrayed in Glory, swaying against His supernatural blue sky.
The Greek word for forgiveness that is used in the Bible is aphemi. It’s an accounting term, meaning to settle a debt and start over with a clear account. When we forgive someone, we are not condoning what happened. We are leaving it to God to be the “debt collector”. If you’ve ever had a bill in collections, you know how aggravating those phone calls can be. If you are like me, you may be calling up those old emotions every time you stew over the past. When you don’t aphemi, or clear the accounting ledgers, you call up bitterness, anger, fear, rejection, and pain repeatedly in your mind and body.
Sometimes forgiveness is reconciliation, sometimes it is not (or not yet.) When Jesus recruited his disciples, it says in the Bible they “aphemied” their boats and nets. They left them behind and started fresh. I bet they left some emotional accounts behind as well. Yet, they weren’t focused on the past. They were full of the work they had to do, they were about the Father’s business (Thank you pastor Bobbie Clear for that phrase.)
God doesn’t cause suffering. He is sovereign, but He is not all-powerful. Not on this planet. Suffering is just what humans choose, have always chosen, as many have pointed out. We choose suffering and then blame God. We choose our own adventure. Sometimes, we suffer because of others' choices, aka other people’s (mis)adventures through this fallen world.
What helps the pain is focusing on any true, noble, just, pure, lovely or good thing (Philippians 4:8). Baby G kicks her legs like the miracle they are, whenever she hears music. My daughter’s gene therapy to arrest her spinal muscular atrophy. The nurse who taught me the hiemlich just days before my oldest choked and we saved her; but for a moment she was silent of Your breath in her lungs, how she violently cried and roared back to life once the danger had passed. Dark days can become like lights strung up. Testimony is those things that could have been endings, but were just beginnings. Like Jesus.
The ending to this essay came organically. One day, I saw the person I had been trying to forgive, who hurt my family. I hollered at them. What I said wasn’t a threat, or a curse, or anything bad at all. But, it wasn’t the nicest voice, recounting what they did to us. My voice rang out in the morning air, this person's steps faltered as they scurried away. I wrote to them. As it turns out, they ARE deeply sorry, and have been in a hole of pain, shame and dispair about what they did. They’re not doing great right now, and haven’t handled things well. They met with my husband to further apologize for hurting our family, especially our children. We all feel lighter. It’s still not okay what happened, but at least we know why and we are not left behind wondering about this person’s heart.
When I feel like I am too hurt over how I was treated by someone to aphemi— I remember this: who do I want to keep accounts with? Who do I do business with? Who do I want to entertain in my thoughts and will it keep me from from His table? I look to His hills and the holy, pure mountains that are my children’s faces. I touch their cheeks; wipe them clean after each meal.
We do not get the blessing of hearing an apology from an enemy very often. Aphemi is trusting that God is inviting you to sit and have the best meal of your life, on the House, while you trust with a childlike wonder that He is plowing those other children’s hearts and the unearthing may not be pretty. We all have virgin soil somewhere we may not even know about yet, waiting to be supernaturally disturbed. Someone else’s heart may look fallow from the outside; I try and hold out hope that the story isn’t finished here on earth.
What if your forgiveness could be someone else’s seed?
