Forgiveness
is a Gift
Christmas is a time of giving and receiving gifts. How about giving the
gift of forgiveness to someone who has hurt you this Christmas? The gift will
not only heal their heart, but it will also bring healing to your heart. Forgiveness
is truly a gift to be shared, but it takes practice to learn how to share this
gift.
When our children were very small, I remember how difficult it was for me
to accept the idea of forgiveness on a practical level. It goes both ways, we forgive, and we ask to
be forgiven. Our family was having
breakfast when my toddler son spilled his milk.
I reacted by scolding him, and he immediately started crying. I went to the kitchen to get him some more
milk and in the process spilled a whole lot more milk than he did. My first thought was to quietly clean it up
and not say anything, but I knew that wouldn’t be right. As hard as it was, I returned with the milk
and apologized to my son and the family.
That act of forgiveness healed his little heart and taught me this is
the only way I would be able to teach my family about forgiveness. I would have to be the first to ask for
forgiveness when I did wrong.
Apologizing to people is one of the ways we open the door to
forgiveness. No matter what it takes, we
have to forgive, even those who won’t forgive us. The benefits of forgiveness are wonderful,
but the consequences of not forgiving are devastating. How many marriages could have been saved from
divorce if both or even one of the spouses had learned to say these simple
words, “I’m sorry.” Dick Keys writes
insightfully about our difficulty of offering apologies:
Apologies are never easy, but apologies for resentment are among the most
difficult. This is because the same pride that drives us into resentment blocks
our retreat from it. Think of the difference between the ways a squirrel and a
cat climb a tree. The squirrel has the equivalent of your thumb on the back of
its front paws which enables it to scamper down a tree as easily and neatly as
it goes up it. The cat, on the other hand, has only claws on the front of its
paws. It can climb up a tree very
nicely, but it is a great indignity for a cat to come down. It must come down
backwards, usually very slowly, twisting and clutching at the bark, looking
over one shoulder. A cat might climb to
the top of a tree and the fire department comes to carry it down on a
ladder. In our rush into anger at high
speed and with great ease and there we sit in the high branches, with the
reminder, ‘Anger lodges in the bosom of fools’ (Eccl. 7-9). To get rid of resentment can be an awkward
and humiliating experience. Like the
cat, we too would rather wait until someone hears our howling and sympathizes
with us, and helps to carry us down from our perch with gentleness and dignity.
In short, we wait for the other person to apologize to us.[i]
Getting past the hurts others have done to us is vital to seeing our
future. Unless we are able to forgive
and allow God’s forgiveness to heal our broken hearts, we will never see the
future God has for us. One time when
ordering Chinese food, I received a fortune cookie that read: “Time heals all
wounds.” How often have we heard this
refrain, but it is simply not true. Time
alone is not enough to heal our deepest wounds, only God can do that though the
gift of forgiveness.
