I have heard it taught all my life that we are to forgive and forget the hurts that are caused by others. It seems to me that people who teach this really do not want to deal with real life. How can you forget something when the consequences of that hurt will last a lifetime? How can you forget something has happened when the consequences of that hurt will set off a chain of hurts that will last 3, 4, or even 5 generations? Are you really supposed to forgive someone who has not asked for forgiveness (This one question is debated by theologians in their ivory towers)? I do not have the answers to these questions. I can only tell what has happened to me.
I have struggled with this as a kid and through my teen years & into married life with 2 kids of my own. I had learned to bury my hurt and to put on a mask that nothing was wrong. This got me through most times, but there came a time when it did not. There came a time when the person who hurt me became someone that I dealt with on a regular basis. This caused many emotions to stir within me and I had to deal with them to keep them from disrupting the relationships with my family. Also, this person has never acknowledged that he has ever done anything wrong and to add insult to injury he claimed to be a Christian and that caused me to think that he would never be punished for what he did.
I did a lot of praying about this, telling God off on many occasions about what had transpired. I held nothing back from ripping God for what I thought about His part in this. I felt that God's response to me was that my real problem was that I did not think that Jesus' death was sufficient to pay for what had happened to me. I felt that God wanted me to use my imagination to go back in time and for me to beat, whip and crucify Jesus for what had happened to me. I knew the story well, so I was able to go back in my imagination and do all of those things to Jesus. As I was doing them, I felt God telling me to do more, do it harder, and to get it all out. After I had done this, I felt a hug from God and Him telling me that now I knew that punishment had been taken care of. At that moment, I felt the ability to love that person. Also, I took ownership of my reactions to that hurt instead of using that person as a scapegoat.
What I have taken form this is that forgiveness does not mean that those things never happened. It is a way to get past those hurts. Jesus' death becomes a substitute for the punishment that other person deserves as well as a cure for me. It has & is slowly changing me from the inside out, correcting any bad actions on my part that would have come out because of the hurt.
Dennis great post and you actually touched on a partial conversation that my husband and I had today. However, you are a bigger and better person than I. Yes Jesus' death was sufficient to pay for what had happened to me. But I don't know of any verse in the Bible where it says to forgive and forget. In recovery we are taught that we are to forgive, but forgetting is not taught. We have those memories to teach us not to go there again, and to remember where we came from. But I still question why the person who did what they did was never punished. I know that is probably all a contradiction, but it is someone I cannot get past, and not sure I ever will.
ReplyDeleteThe forgetting part comes from "God remembers our sins no more". I do not agree with this interpretation but I understand where it comes from. When any of us says that someone did not get punished, we say it from our perspective. The reality is that we do not know if they were ever "punished" or not. My thoughts now are that they have been. The agony of the soul is one of the worst things that can happen to a person and that is one thing that we usually can't see. From what I have seen, forgiving another person is more about our own healing than it has to do with them. The other person will either accept our forgiveness of them or be tormented by it - the choice is theirs.
ReplyDelete