Finding a Way to Forgive

(I'm a bit under the weather, so no blog yesterday.  Sorry. Apologies in advance for any typos I miss.)

So: there is no question that forgiveness is an essential part of the good news of Christianity.  God forgives us as we forgive others.  We have a mandate to forgive, as foreign as forgiveness may be to our human inclination.

So, what do we do when we have someone or something we cannot humanly forgive?  Do we just resign ourselves to a harsh judgment and remain unforgiving?  Of course not.

We invite God to help. 

Now, I'll be the first to admit that forgiveness does not come naturally to me.  The idea of an eye for an eye sounds pretty good to me sometimes.  I can think of a person or two whose downfall would seem to me to be simple justice and carry a personal satisfaction that distresses me to contemplate.  Yet, forgiving does not come easily to me and perhaps, not to you either.

Some aspects of life are just too big for us to handle on our own.  We know what to do: enlist God's help. When it comes to forgiveness, though, if we are honest, we may not really want God's help because we are not ready to let go.  Instead of falling into self-condemnation, though, we can move forward.

The trick is to take it as slowly as we must, being compassionate with ourselves along the way.  Why the compassion?  Because inability to forgive is directly linked to live, throbbing pain.  The bigger the hurt, the harder to forgive the one who caused it.

So we begin by turning to God and admitting our pain as well as our weakness.  We recognize our need to forgive and to heal, and we ask God's help in healing our hurt so that we can find our way to forgiveness.

Maybe the issue is still so live that we cannot ask God to help us to forgive.  With compassion, we recognize this and ask God to help us heal.  We ask God to bring us peace and relief from the pain.  As we find peace, the rest will come.

If that is too much for us, we can still move toward forgiveness.  We can ask God to help us to move toward readiness to forgive.  If need be, we can ask God to help us to become ready to begin moving toward readiness, or to become ready to consider eventually becoming ready to forgive.

We can word our prayer however we must in order to take that first step.  I recall speaking with someone who was so unwilling to forgive that our prayer went something like, "Dear God, I ask you to help me escape from the pain of this incident.  I ask you as well to help me to become ready to consider the possibility that at some time in the future I may become willing to begin my journey toward forgiving N. for the hurt he has caused me."

When I tell that story, people often chuckle, but the prayer is valid.  We're not telling God something God doesn't already know when we acknowledge how unready we are to forgive.  When we invite God into our pain and unwillingness, we acknowledge God's power to transform it -- and us as well.