When I was recently graduated from high school my parents appealed to agencies for assistance in taking care of my disabled brother. We found one agency who was willing to assist and for a time we were able to find some good help. As time went on though, the people they were sending were either unprepared or unable to assist with someone as severe as he was. One of those people was a girl I knew from school. She quit only a few weeks in after having to change one of his soiled diapers. A week or two later, a representative from the state department of child and family protective services showed up to examine the situation--apparently she'd reported to them. Everything was cleared, but it left the family in an extreme case of shock and hurt that someone would make that accusation about us. This hit me as hard as it did the rest of the family. I remember going to bed that night feeling that night feeling extremely hurt, and knowing how much it would affect my ability to sleep, and not liking the feeling, I knelt and prayed. An indescribable sense of calm overcame me after crying it all out, and I was able to go to sleep in peace. The next evening I was talking to a sister about it, and she was still fuming over it and struggling with forgiving her at that point. I advised her to let it go, and she seemed to be a little surprised at how calm I was about it. This was an important process for me, because it wasn't long after that I'd found myself encountering her at college. Coming face to face with her after knowing what she did was a true test of where I stood. I indeed remembered what she did when I saw her face. That wasn't the important issue. The real issue dealt with how I felt when I saw her and how I chose to act accordingly. My choice then was to leave the past be in the past and treat her in the same general friendly manner like I would with anyone else. Ending result: a clear conscience and no regrets. I've had the opportunity to exercise this many times, and even if this doesn't fix them, it certainly fixes me.
Being a sensitive type of person means that I've been no stranger to hurt. From the mean kids in school to the school teacher or coworkers from various jobs who mistreated me to friends or family saying things to me they don't realize hurt me to the people in public who misread me and made judgements from it, I've had to deal with it often. I have enough good reasons to be bitter, but I am not. I don't choose to focus on those things, and you might say that's part of forgiving, but I've come to learn there's more depth in forgiveness than just selectively choosing what to focus on. As everyone well knows, some experiences are impossible to obliterate from memory, and people are always discussing what "Forgive and Forget" really means.
My story is a great example of what I think forgetting means. It's not the forgetting of the memory, as I remembered well what she did to our family when I saw her again. The forgetting was how I allowed myself to feel and respond in response to seeing her again. No, I didn't forget the memory, but I forgot the pain and remembered the peace. I left the past in the past and went forward to dealing with her in the present moment.
This being said, I can also confess as easy as this one makes it sound for me to forgive, there are times when the attempt to forgive takes a longer process than just saying one prayer, especially when it involves a situation where deep feelings have been ongoing for multiple years. I've had a surge of those recently. One of my main tests to evaluate my status on whether I've forgiven a person or not is possibly based off of this memory. I imagine myself wandering somewhere and suddenly encountering this person. What is my initial reaction to meeting this person? How do I feel about him or her? How am I going to respond to him or her? If I feel like running the other direction and avoiding the person or simply being confrontational, then I need to work on something. If the memory resurges and I feel angry, scared, hurt, or hateful, then I need to work on something. If the meeting requires interaction, and I find justice and satisfaction in being unkind or unfriendly toward him or her, then I need to work on something.
If the offense is so bad that it requires you to shut the person out of your life, then by all means, do it, but don't let the pain and/or anger fester inside of you. That can be the most destructive of all incidents.
I don't know why this got on my mind this morning, but here it is. Thank you for listening.
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| Peace Rose. |
