One of the wisest verses in the Bible is this:
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” Ephesians 4:32
We all know forgiveness is called for in the Christian life. So why does un-forgiveness thrive among so many of us?
I think it’s because we might not understand our hardened hearts, or that they are even hardened in the first place!
C.S. Lewis has a terrific quote:
“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not when you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them.” Mere Christianity
When we take offense—a reaction to someone else’s mistake—we check ourselves completely out of the equation of having to forgive (not seeing our own mistake in our arithmetic because our mind is not working properly; it’s operating under the control and passion of offense”).
Under these conditions, we will never forgive anyone for their mistake because we don’t see it as a mistake, but as an offense. And in our dysfunctional mind, offenses demand apologies, not forgiveness!
This harboring of offense leads to resentment and holding a grudge. The mind continues to not operate properly, and has now taken the mistake of the other person and turned it into an even greater mistake by ourselves. What could have been addressed or graciously overlooked now takes on a life of its own into quite evil territory—territory we would never consider ourselves to be in because of our sense of self righteousness. When we are so sure we are right, we are blinded that we could be wrong, unreasonable, petty or, alas, unforgiving.
The second half of this entanglement is our own obliviousness to mistakes that we, ourselves, have made, that also have resulted in offense, hurt, and any number of other negative manifestations! That is the other ugly side of offense: we are so busy being offended that we forget we, too, have said dumb things, been ungrateful, forgot to be somewhere, ran late, didn’t show up at all and on and on.
And one of the ways we can be ignorant of our own mis-steps is because the person on the receiving end showed grace instead of offense. They did not allow our mistake to turn, for them, into a grudge and a state of un-forgiveness.
The irony with grudge-holding is that the initial mistake perpetrated will soon be outshone by the mountainous chip on one’s shoulder that takes its place, revealing the greater discrepancy in character to be that of the grudge-holder.
It is a sign of weakness, neediness and self-involvement to only see one side of any situation: our own! To not be willing to either address something or someone, or let it go, is the pinnacle of narcissism, because it allows the narcissist ever more self-promotion.
But often, we don’t see all of this when it’s happening, just like we can’t see our error in the mathematical problem, or we don’t know we’re sleeping when we are asleep!
The key is to jolt the mind into working properly through self-reflection founded on prayer, Scripture meditation, quietly listening to God and heeding the Spirit’s guiding feedback.
It takes time, and may be painful, but the receiving of the truth about ourselves in the safety and love of the Lord’s arms is so much better than marching around people and circumstances wielding grudges.
These grudges do not affirm us as we hoped they would; they only seem to pile on and separate us even more from people, often the people we love most.
And that is a mistake—not a mistake made by someone else, but a mistake made by us. And only we can own up to it in order to break the pattern, arrive at forgiveness and begin working on how to maturely navigate future exchanges and interactions with the properly functioning mind of Christ, who will generously lead us into all truth and wisdom when we ask.
Copyright Barb Harwood
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