Forgiveness

The Lord sets prisoners free. – Psalm 146:7

No one knows the dark path to forgiveness like a divorced parent. The natural response to an offense against our children is to retain our anger bitterly, never forgetting what has happened. But unforgiveness is a prison built for one. It does nothing to repay the person who hurt our kids. Instead, it nourishes bitter thoughts, which torment us like steady drips of water. It stunts our growth and, ironically, it can damage the lives of the children we hope to avenge.

Pretty bleak metaphor – a prison and water torture! Obviously, forgiveness is extremely necessary for our growth and healing.

Jesus was big on forgiveness. In Matthew 18 he tells a serious parable, in which a servant, who was forgiven a huge debt, refuses to forgive another servant who owed him only a little. Jesus warns us that if we do not forgive, we will be required to pay back our debt. (I don’t know how this ties in with our salvation, but I can assure you that we are saved by grace, through faith alone.) Remembering our offenses against God, which He has forgiven, helps us to view the offender with humility.

I’ve noticed that we tend to misunderstand forgiveness. We think it’s a matter of grasping why the person wronged us. If we can blame their actions on some terrible trauma, we can excuse them. Empathy helps, but its goal is not to convince us the person couldn’t help it. To forgive, we must face the fact that we were wronged. Then we must choose to let it go. This is only possible by God’s powerful Holy Spirit within us.

Forgiveness is like releasing something from our possession. I once hauled a couch single-handedly to our local dump. (What was I thinking?!) I had to remove the seats from my van and leverage the thing out my sliding door, off the deck, into the passenger space. Inside the huge, reeking dumpshed, I backed my van to the edge of the concrete pit, where piles of stinking garbage await their afterlife. I leveraged that huge couch out of my van and onto the garbage heap, holding my breath the entire time. I drove out of there lickety-split, leaving the couch behind forever. That’s what we do with offenses against us.

It's worth mentioning that forgiveness is given, but trust is built. God does not require us to trust a person when we forgive them. Exspouses remain a part of our lives if we are coparenting children with them. Many single parents face repeated offenses, which requires ongoing forgiveness - and the establishment of boundaries. If this is your situation, you must use appropriate boundaries to protect yourself and your children from further abuse.

When we let a person off the hook, through forgiveness, we are released from our bitter prison. What a beautiful gift for the children we love!