Forgiveness

Forgiveness is releasing the wounds and sins done against us and putting them on the cross but this is a process. We need to KEEP releasing the bitterness. It’s a letting go and a giving up the right to anger, to expect to be paid back. It is supernatural. Lack of forgiveness cuts us off from other people.

The steps to forgiveness are costly and depend on our heart attitudes—do we want vengeance or mercy/grace/forgiveness? We think, “Mercy for me and judgment for you,” but we’ll be judged by the way we judge others. Grace and mercy means, “You owe and I pay,” but then we give the payment to Jesus.

Forgiveness is NOT:

• Forgetting
  
• Excusing—forgiveness is for the inexcusable
  
• Reconciliation—for this the other needs to recognize the offense and its impact
  
• Refusing to set boundaries
  
• Shielding the other from consequences

We don’t go to someone and speak our forgiveness to them unless they ask. The forgiveness we do is before the cross.

The danger of unforgiveness is that the resulting bitterness can make us sick. Bitterness is like being connected to an intravenous drip. As we are disconnected from the drip, healing can begin. Unforgiveness binds us to the person and sometimes is generalized to include whole groups such as all men, a particular race, etc. That little grudge we nurse can grow until it kills us.

What are the steps to healing?

1. Name the person
   
2. Name the offense against me (what was the injustice?). Don’t minimize.
   
3. Name the effects on me (for instance,, “I feel dismissed.”
   
4. Feel the legitimate response to the wounding that happened.

But how do we know if we have forgiven? When you hear her name, do you see flames? When you hear good things about or for her, do you rage? Can you resist telling everyone about her offense?

We were each given a piece of paper and told to follow the steps above, writing them out for each offense. At the front corner of the room was the large wooden cross that had been at the front all week. A very long, red chiffon “scarf” was draped down, from the centre of the cross, over a low stool and to the ground, representing the blood of Jesus. On the stool was a large bowl filled with an red, opaque liquid, also representing Jesus’ blood. When we were done writing, we were to take our papers to the cross and bury them in the blood.

I had many things on my sheet of paper but there was more, an unammed cloud that filled the symptoms of unforgiveness that were listed—depression, chronic illness, etc. I stayed in my seat a long time. In fact, it seemed like everyone else was long finished before I finally got up to put my paper in the blood at the foot of the cross.

The front of the room had two patio doors exiting onto a balcony which looked out onto the beautifully manicured grounds below. Because of the heat, these doors were open and one was right beside the cross. I stood against this door and looked at the cross, trying to figure out who to forgive for what. I realized that the cloud was over things that had profoundly affected me long before my memories begin. How does one tap into these things? Finally one of the leaders came to pray for me. I told him about my confusion and he encouraged me to pray, declaring that I want to forgive even though I didn’t know for what and ask God to reveal the “what” to me.

God started to reveal things. When I was born, my mom was encouraged to give me up for adoption. There was a couple who wanted to adopt me. They were the first people God brought to my mind. If they had adopted me, my life would have been easier. I needed to forgive them for not insisting. I had to forgive my mom for being too broken to mother me the way I needed. There was more. The leader prayed me through these and blessed me by dipping his finger into the “blood” and anointing my forehead.

He left and I continued to stand and contemplate. I spoke forgiveness for all sorts of things around my earliest years, fumblingly trying to clear the cloud around me and find the key issue, and then I realized. My mother had been excommunicated from her church because she bore me out of wedlock (or maybe it was because she chose to live with my father unmarried—he was unable to get a divorce from his first wife). It was my church that rejected my mother and, by extension, me. I was not worthy. I was abandoned and unwanted by them! My mom did love me. She wanted me. So did my dad or he would have left her and me. He didn’t. But the church shut us out. While our parents, and especially our fathers, represent God to us, even more so should the Church. The Church is the very Body of Christ and its leaders have a responsibility to extend grace and mercy. I’m not saying they were wrong, just how what they did affected me at the most primal level.

How did it affect my mom? She adored Jesus and loved this church. Her own sense of abandonment, rejection, wounding, hurt, and disappointment must have been huge and that would have been passed to me. From my first breath, even though I was good enough for my mother, I wasn’t good enough for her church and, by extension, for God. No wonder I have issues with rejection, and never feeling loved, wanted and accepted! And so of course I offered up my forgiveness of this church I grew up in; this church (it’s just hit me) which refused to marry me because the elder filling in for the pastor at the time didn’t realize that my fiancé WAS a baptized member of the church. (I know I’ve got a lot of processing ahead of me on this one—and probably more forgiving to do as well.) As I continued to stand there, next to the cross, contemplating the profundity of this, it occurred to me. I needed the cleansing of that blood that was “pouring down”—Jesus’ blood—and so I sought the leader who had prayed with me and asked him to come back to the cross and sprinkle that red water over me.