Beginning the Quest
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Ephesians 4:32
MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTION of a forgiveness-related experience was being told to sit in a chair in a corner until I was willing to say, "I'm sorry." I never recall the other side, being told to sit in a corner until I was willing to forgive a brother or sister (I was one of eight children) who had hurt me. Authentic forgiveness requires both elements, a genuine spirit of forgiveness on the part of the person wronged and a genuine expression of sorrow on the part of the offender. When both attitudes meet, forgiveness takes place.
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In my childhood, forgiveness was not often talked about. My family always went to church. In the process, I learned the Lord's Prayer (probably by osmosis), with its "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." I don't recall any specific teaching about what that clause in the prayer meant.
We children learned a prayer common in that era, always repeated at bedtime: "Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Lord, bless ...," and family members were named. There was nothing about forgiveness in the prayer. Indeed, the prayer had a solitary focus: keep my soul either while I sleep or in the event of my death during the night. I don't remember ever hearing a comparable morning prayer for the day.
A forced repentance ("sit there until ...") may be a step above no repentance at all, but I quickly learned that the magic words "I'm sorry" freed me from that "prison." So the words often taught hypocrisy more than anything else. The "real sorrow" was to be caught! Although in my family I saw little parental practice of genuinely expressing "I'm sorry" or of showing a spirit of forgiveness, I don't believe our family was abnormal in that respect.
My own relationship with my father was a source of grief to me over many years. I relate it as an example
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that I will refer to from time to time by way of illustration.
I was the third boy in our family. My mother died less than two weeks after I was born. My father subsequently remarried, and there were five more children: three boys and two girls. As we children grew up, there never was any sense of "we" versus "them" from either side — at least that was my perception.
Early on, I became aware of the fact that my father was always "on my case." I don't mean that he was physically abusive. I simply could never do anything well enough to please him. For example, a school holiday was usually anticipated. For me, Washington's Birthday was not a happy occasion. I hated the day. We had a large garden, and every year Washington's Birthday marked the first planting of peas. Peas had to be planted in a particular pattern. If I planted them straight enough to please my father, I was not fast enough; if I was fast enough, the peas were not straight enough. I could not win. If I was a partner with my father in croquet, I was always told what shot to make (or attempt) when it was my turn. The fear of missing the shot did not encourage success! There is no need for multiple examples. My failure to please my father was not from my lack of trying! My sense of helplessness was heightened because I could never
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understand the reason I did not measure up to his expectations.
Near the end of my first year in college I learned of an opportunity for summer work with the Weyerhauser Lumber Company in the Northwest. The manager, a committed Christian, was recruiting Christian college men to work in the woods with the company's loggers.
Such a job would provide help with college expenses. More importantly to me, one of the manager's explicit goals was to have the summer employees work alongside the loggers and be ready to share Christ with them. The idea appealed to me very much, and I came to the conclusion that it was God's will for me to apply. I broached the idea to my father, assuming his ready assent. My assumption rested on the fact that spending the summer in that way involved two things high on his scale of values: hard work and money. To my surprise, he said a very emphatic no.
Over the ensuing days, our respective positions became more rigidly fixed. Because I believed it was God's will for me to try for it, I could see nothing else. I was nineteen, living at home, and my father was paying my college expenses. These were factors that did not enter the equation in my thinking.
One morning, as I was getting ready to leave for school, my father came to my room, closed the door,
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leaned against it and said to me, "You broke my heart once; I will not let you do it again. If you go ahead with this scheme, do not come back home." Then he turned and left the room. I was dumbfounded!
After further consideration, I decided to go ahead with the application. When I told the man who was handling the applications what had happened, he said that they would not accept my application under those conditions. That was how the matter was resolved. I reported that fact to my father, and neither of us ever spoke of it again. (Interestingly, many years later I was chatting with the man who had proposed the summer program. He told me the plan never materialized, for a variety of reasons. Still, the proposal had a profound effect on my life!)
My father's statement made clear the reason for the problem we had had through the years — he had blamed me for the death of my mother! To blame an infant for the death of his mother is altogether irrational as well as wrong, but it was nonetheless real. That part of what he said was clear enough immediately.
Another part of what he said didn't sink in for more than forty years. I heard his words, but I didn't hear what I now think the words involved. "I will not let you [break my hear] again" — is that not an expression of love? His heartbreak was something
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neither he nor I could have prevented. My father was not one to express his love in ways I understood as a child or a youth. I think it fair to say that my ongoing experience of endlessly feeling put down had deafened me to any oblique expression of his love. His heartbreak in the death of my mother was understandable. The ways he expressed that heartbreak toward me remained a mystery to me.
Dad was a good father in many ways. He provided well for his family — no mean accomplishment through the years of the Depression with eight children. We lived in a lovely home. Most of us had music lessons. Although my father never got as far as high school himself, each of us went to college, three of us receiving one or more graduate degrees. He paid a large part of the cost of undergraduate education for all of us. He also made sure that the six of us boys learned how to work. My father had a sense of humor, though it was sometimes expressed at the expense of others. We regularly attended church. We had many good experiences as a family.
I make no mention here of the only person I ever knew as a mother in these memories of my growing-up years. Although aware that the good things I enjoyed then could not have been mine apart from her, I have focused on my relationship with
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my father and insights that relationship provided for my understanding of forgiveness. Laudable qualities do not remove the harm that one human being can do to another. Only a full-orbed forgiveness can do that. What that "full-orbed" forgiveness entails will become apparent as the book unfolds.
In my youth, I often heard that I could not do anything well, which I gradually interpreted to mean that I could scarcely do things even adequately. My failure to win approval from my father left me with little confidence in who I was and what I was capable of doing. That is a painful heritage. Reading became one avenue of escape. Also, though still immature in my Christian faith, I understood, at least dimly, that I had value in God's eyes.
God used two experiences in a single weekend to give me a new and growing sense of genuine self-worth. In the spring that I turned nineteen I attended a weekend Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship conference. One of the speakers that particular weekend emphasized the truth that Christ lives in the Christian, e.g., Galatians 2:20: "I stand crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me ..." (my rendering). This truth came through with special clarity in the Saturday evening session. For me, that truth was simply revolutionary: If Christ lives in me, then I am of genuine worth, of value —
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and no one can take the reality of Christ's presence from me! The wonder of that truth (and its sharp contrast with my earlier poor image of myself) has continued to warm my heart through the ensuing years.
The second experience that reinforced the turn-around of my attitude toward myself involved a young woman who attended that same conference. We had known who the other was as the result of a high school class together. In addition, one of my sisters was a good friend of her sister, one of my brothers had dated her sister a few times, and we were in the same youth group at our church. That weekend, she caught my attention in a new way. How does one explain that kind of mystery? At the conference I so lacked confidence in myself that I would only sit where I could see her.
I screwed up my courage and asked that young lady, for our first date, to a Seattle church during the following week. We went to hear the Inter-Varsity conference speaker who had been used of God to touch me very deeply the previous weekend. Just to ask her to go with me was a major step! Our relationship grew quickly into friendship, then love, and three and half years later, Maureen and I were married.
I do not know what other people saw in me following
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that conference. I do have some clear ideas of what began to happen within me. And it was all powerfully positive!
Maureen's growing care about me simply because I was "me" relieved me of any required performance, conditions or demands. (I did not have to plant the peas straight enough and fast enough!) There were no demands. Being loved unconditionally by this one person freed me in relationships with other people. However others (my father, in particular) regarded me, I now had one secure, tangible relationship. The implications of that reality did not spring instantly into place, but the foundation was there upon which new relationships could be built.
The first time I sensed any pride in me on my father's part came when I finished my flight training, received my wings and was commissioned an officer in the Army Air Corps early in World War II. I was twenty-two.
How could a father blame an infant for the death of his mother? This question haunted me as I grappled with the relational problem between my father and me. Did I not have some responsibility for reaching out for a measure of reconciliation? Yes, I did, though I never made the slightest overture in that direction before my father died, more
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than thirty-five years ago. I think the reason was partly my deep-seated and long-standing fear of my father. Fear and love make strange bedfellows.
Still, why wasn't my newfound sense of who I am "in Christ" enough to move me toward healing the strained relationship with my father? Did I too gladly hold tight to my resentment? Was I being as "generous" in spirit toward my father as I was toward myself? Did I look for factors in his life that boxed him in to blaming me for my mother's death?
Regretfully, the answers to these questions for many years were the wrong ones. I was slow to accept any responsibility for my attitudes, and quick to blame him for his. My father could not say, quite simply, "I was wrong in saying [or doing] what I did. I am truly sorry that I hurt you." And I did not yet understand the meaning of a spirit of forgiveness.
Healthy solutions to problems of broken relationships are not usually worked out quickly or easily. My father and I both seemed unable to accept our individual responsibility for changing our own responses to the other.
Genuinely forgiving my father did not come easily for me. Although I became able to say the words to myself (long after his death), it was some time before the reality of forgiveness was there. After I believed I had truly forgiven him, I still found some dark, unwelcome pockets of continuing resentment.
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One year our daughter gave me as a birthday gift Lewis Smedes' book Forgive and Forget. I began to see that I had hated my father for years. To use Smedes' distinction (in chapter 2), mine had not been an aggressive hatred, but rather a passive, smoldering hate deep within me. This insight shocked me.
Stemming from the hurts of the past, that hatred had been as destructive to me as to my father. Hatred of a person precludes the development of a healthy relationship with that person. Hatred also diminishes the hater's capacity to love. Although my father was dead, I was still unconsciously carrying seeds of hate. This realization sharply reminded me that I had much to learn about the healing of strained and broken relationships.
Forgiveness always presupposes a problem. The problem basically is a bent or fractured relationship. The number of stressful personal relationships is legion. One example of such a relational problem is the high rate of divorce in our country, with its frequent and tragic estrangement for children. A marriage normally begins with joy and the expectation of permanence in the relationship. In reality, disagreements, hurts, accusations enter and one or the other, often both, are wounded. Too often there is not adequate effort to heal the wounds.
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Additional hurts compound the problem. After a while, it seems easier to sever the relationship than to heal it.
Other kinds of problem relationships are found in business, education, friendships, sports, etc. There are many examples of bent or broken ties that need mending. "Left alone, cracks widen, and for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness" (Yancey, What's So Amazing About Grace?, p. 84).
Learning the richness of forgiveness is often a slow process. Part of the reason is that forgiveness is not only cognitive. It goes beyond simply understanding what the barriers are to healthy relationships and how to remove them. The more fundamental problem is volitional. We are often unwilling to admit that we do not care enough to learn what was in the mind of the one who wronged us and to approach that person with a view to talking through what we see as the problem. Often enough, one person hurts another without realizing it.
The nature and process of forgiving in God's way is the focus of the chapters that follow. This introductory chapter already suggests some pressing questions: (1) How do the two elements of forgiveness, a spirit of forgiveness and repentance, become realities in our relationships? (2) What is
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the goal of forgiveness — why bother with forgiveness? (3) If I am wronged, isn't there some place for justice — how do forgiveness and justice relate to each other?
The backdrop for all that follows is Paul's demanding prescription: "Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32, see also Colossians 3:13). In all matters of forgiveness, God is both our Model and the very fount of forgiveness.
Because we hurt one another so easily, each of us has ample opportunities to say from the heart, "I'm sorry," and to maintain a spirit of forgiveness toward those who wrong us. None of us is exempt from struggling with forgiveness. Realization of how fully God has forgiven us is clouded by our own demands that justice be met to our satisfaction before we consider forgiving another. We do not understand that in Christ the legitimate claims of justice are already met. (See Chapter 4 for a development of this truth.)
Forgiveness of those we believe have wronged us in significant matters rarely comes all at once. More often forgiving is a painful process. Our will is slow to respond in the way God asks. Our growth in the willing and doing of forgiveness is helped if we keep returning to the model God sets before us.
I close this introductory chapter with three
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thoughtful and heartwarming statements regarding forgiveness:
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Questions for Discussion
1. What is your earliest recollection of any experience or teaching regarding forgiveness?
2. What is your own present understanding of forgiveness? Do you have any feel as to how your present understanding of forgiveness came about?
3. In which of your relationships do you find the greatest struggle regarding forgiveness? Do you find that your closest relationships are the most difficult to work through to forgiveness? If so, why do you think that is the case?
