Forgiveness
“The difference between holding on to a hurt or releasing it with forgiveness is like the difference between laying your head down at night on a pillow filled with thorns or a pillow filled with rose petals.” Loren Fischer,More Stories for the Heart. Compiled by Alice Gray, Multnomah Publishers, Inc. 1997, p. 102.
“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Ephesians 4:32
I think my overwhelming fear of people, which eventually led to depression and suicide attempts, began with my father yelling at me and spanking me with a belt when I was a child. I took that fear into adulthood, harboring resentment toward my dad and blaming him for my problems. This led to perfectionism which increased the fear of people. I tried to maintain perfection so that no one would get mad and criticize me.
What a terrible way to live! Thanks be God, He rescued me from a life of fear and depression. No one is or can be perfect. The only perfect person to live on this earth was Jesus. At many of my jobs, I looked “perfect” on the outside while falling apart inside. In my late twenties I worked as a sales rep for Dale Carnegie Company, known for positive thinking and helping clients overcome their fear of speaking. I broke several records in sales, and as part of my job I demonstrated public speaking at training sessions. Clients would say afterwards, “I wish I had my life together like you do.” What a joke! It was during my time at Dale Carnegie that I almost died after a suicide attempt. We can fool a lot of people, but not the God who created us (see Psalm 139).
After God led me to accept Christ as my Savior in 1979, He began to deal with my heart issue of unforgiveness toward my dad. I began looking at my dad from a different perspective. I thought of the long hours he worked as a milkman at Carnation Milk Company to support my mom and four kids. What little money we had went towards food and clothing for us kids. I thought about him coming home with Moon Pies for us. I thought about him getting up at 3:30 am for his milk route and then coming home and going to bed about the time we got home from school. We would roughhouse and wake him up. Those were the times we were yelled at and spanked with a belt.
My dad grew up in an era when many men did not express their feelings. Several of my peers expressed the same thing I experienced with my dad – never hearing their dad say, “I love you.” As I grew in my faith, I knew it was time to let my dad know that I loved him – something I had never told him either. One day as I was about to hang up from a phone call, I said, “I love you, Daddy.” To my surprise he said, “I love you too.” From then on, whenever we talked on the phone, he was the first one to say “I love you” before we hung up.
We cannot imagine how much God has forgiven us in Christ! How can we hold on to unforgiveness considering His forgiveness? It takes God’s grace for us to forgive those who have hurt us, often unintentionally. It takes God’s grace for us not to be victims of our past but to realize that God can use even hurts, disappointments, and trials to make us more like Christ. May we pray for God’s grace to live out Ephesians 4:32, forgiving others as God in Christ forgave us.
See you next week!
