I both love and hate my psychology classes because they challenge me. They force me to grow and stretch and sometimes it hurts! Recently we've been talking about relational wounds. It also just so happens that God is talking to me about my wounds. To make a long story short: in this last month I have come face to face with a few of my very deep, very ugly wounds. I don't like facing my wounds. It requires I own up to a few things, a few scary things.
It requires I own up to the fact that something is not right. I don't know if you have ever dealt with your body or life breaking down, if you have ever realized in sheer terror, that something is wrong and you have absolutely no control over it. The realization that something is wrong with your heart and soul, with the very core of you, is horrifying.
It also requires that I face the wound-er. This is hard no matter what... but when the wound-er is still very present in your life it is even scarier, especially when the wound-er is not repentant in the slightest. In this instance it feels like I am saying "go ahead, hurt me again." What I have to remind myself of is the fact that forgiving is not forgetting. It is freeing them from captivity, it is relinquishing the hurt they caused to be healed by God, but it is not inviting them to do it again. In no way is saying "I forgive you" similar to "do it again." Actually, they are polar opposites.
Forgiving someone requires one very important thing: living within the realization that you have worth in His eyes. Saying "do it again" is living in the belief that you have no worth. In order to have the confidence to say "I forgive you" we have to live within the confidence of who God has created us to be. We have to recognize that we have been hurt, we have been wronged and we have to relinquish ourselves from that hurt. In this confidence we grow a new ability, an ability to say one life defining word: "no." When we are operating out of the knowledge that our life has meaning and purpose it enables us to set boundaries. We get to say "I mean more than this and you cannot treat me this way."
But forgiving isn't easy and thats okay. This might seem silly, but being a perfectionist, I get frustrated when I haven't forgiven someone. I get frustrated going through the process. I would prefer the process of forgiving was a one and done kind of thing. But perhaps this is what Jesus means when he says we're to forgive 70 times 7. It isn't that we're supposed to continually throw ourselves under the bus, it isn't that we are supposed to get hurt repeatedly. Perhaps what Jesus meant was that it is a process. It is a daily process of relinquishing. A process we will have to do 70 times 7 over again. It isn't easy. It isn't one and done. And that's okay. Instead of continually berating myself for how I feel like I've accomplished, I ought to celebrate the work I have done. As a hatching butterfly, I often get frustrated with the idea that I am not breaking my cocoon fast enough and I forget to rejoice in the metamorphosis that God is taking me through.
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