The Intimacy of Forgiveness (excerpt from Chapter 23 of Prison Ministry by Lennie Spitale)
While reading this book for my upcoming Correctional Ministries course due to start in a week, this particular chapter really spoke to me. I never thought of forgiveness as an intimate activity, but I think you will agree upon reading the following that it really is.
When we speak of forgiveness we think of three equally hard ways to forgive – to either grant or receive: 1) those that have offended us, 2) those we have offended and 3) from God for our sins. I believe each one is difficult depending on the situation.
Let’s look at the first one granting forgiveness to others – the hurters. TRUE forgiveness is an elusive quarry (a deep pit) because the painful emotions keep returning to us. The author of Prison Ministry likens it to a rubber ball on an elastic string – remember that toy? The emotions strike the paddle of our hearts again and again with renewed pain. Hurt and anger lead us to believe we can never forgive them no matter how hard we try. We forget that our emotions were not created to think; they were only created to feel. Our emotions enable us to experience love, compassion, empathy, sorrow and any other expression of the child of God created in His image.
“But sin has so drenched the world in its all-encompassing stain that we are awash in a sea of tragedy, assault and evil. When these events touch our lives, we respond to them with emotion and emotions don’t reason, they react. They do not think; they feel. Everything about the nightmarish event floods us with emotional pain and fluctuate between numbness, hurt, anger, hatred, and revenge. BUT . . . the radical concepts of Jesus Christ regarding forgiveness challenge them in two ways: 1st we know He expects it of us and 2nd we don’t know if we can be truly genuine about it – will we be emotionally capable while the smoldering fires of pain still burn? What happens when we realize that we have verbalized a commitment to forgive, but still experience the deep hurt and anger whenever we think about the incident? Don’t we often feel like we have failed as a Christian – failed at forgiveness? Jesus said in Matthew 6:14-15 “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
When we can’t do this – we doubt our faith. The problem lies not so much in our Christian desire to forgive as it does in the inability of our emotions to separate what we are feeling from what we believe. Just because we find ourselves experiencing deep feelings of hurt, shame, guilt, or anger doesn’t mean that our commitment to forgive wasn’t sincere. So . . . what gives? How can this be? In God’s desire to forgive us, He agreed to take the pain – to take the full punishment for our sins AND . . . He did not bring them up again!!! Forgiveness was a contract, not a whim – a process, not an event – a commitment to suffer, that we might be released.
This process involves a combined activity of our mind, will and emotions. We first use our minds to acknowledge that God’s way is right (forgiveness). Second, it is an act of obedience – I decide to forgive and choose to do so. Now we come to the third step in the process – the reality that our emotions are involved. It’s where we experience those old negative feelings after our decision to forgive. We think we must not truly have forgiven or else we wouldn’t be feeling this way. BUT . . . this is not the way emotions work.
Emotions do not think – they were not designed to think. The author calls them “headless, winged creatures that sink their talons deep into our hearts whenever they are triggered by certain external stimuli or old memories . . . Experiencing old feelings . . . does not mean we were not sincere in our desire to forgive, it simply means we still carry the lingering pain of those emotions. And forgiveness, simply put, is an agreement to take the pain.” If we aren’t honest in admitting that we feel a certain way then we are only deceiving ourselves.
The choice to forgive can be an immediate point-in-time act of faith, but the emotions will still linger. Now the question remains “what do we do with those emotions?” Ahhhhh – the perfect answer: “bring them to the cross of Jesus each time they rear their ugly heads and share them with Him. Absorb the pain of the hurt, the anger, the desire to retaliate – and release the offender again. And again. It’s the price you agreed to pay as the forgiver.” What does that mean? It means that we enter into an intimacy with Christ – we bring that emotional turmoil to Him and share it with Him – Jesus understands. He’s been there. He is there still, And he will wait for you.