Mikki's Blog - Living in the Grace and Love of God » Relationships

Forgiveness – The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do

Mikki — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:07:27 +0000

Forgiveness is hard. Forgiving an offender is hard. Let’s just cut through the religiousness we hide behind and tell the truth. It is hard. Oh, not so much when someone cuts us off in traffic or steals that parking place we had our eye on. We can move on pretty quickly when the offense is not relational. But it is in relationships that we have the potential to be hurt, offended, betrayed, and find ourselves with a heart struggling to forgive (and it is in relationships that we also have the potential to hurt others, offend others, betray others. As a matter of fact, all, and I do mean all, relationships must deal with this issue.)Whether it is words spoken or the lack or words spoken when we needed them, actions taken or the lack of actions taken, or the million other ways we can be hurt, at times we all find ourselves at times in the position of having a major offense in our hearts that needs to be dealt with.

We Christians build our faith on Christ forgiving us for our sins. Most of us know what the Word says about forgiveness. It’s not for babies. You won’t be forgiven if you don’t forgive. Your lack of forgiveness allows “the tormentors” to access your life. On and on we could go. God doesn’t give us any wiggle room on the issue, but yet we all find ourselves struggling. How do we overcome?

I used to have a nice, neat package answer on this then entered OFFENSE 601, the graduate course. I didn’t even sign-up for it and yet I found myself enrolled, as if it were some sort of required class. More tests than I could even begin to count. I passed some, failed many, and gradually got a grade of Incomplete in the course. But then God reactivated my class status. He has a way of doing that, you know! When we tuck things down inside, allowing them to lie dormant, or so we think, God has a way of bringing them back to the surface. Something happens to remind us of the offense. The emotions spring back up. Alas, back to the old adage, “Things buried alive never die.”

But God, who is committed to our wholeness, has great dredging equipment. He dredges up the “stuff”. And we can’t escape. We come face to face with our pain again. What is a believer to do? What are the truths we need to know about forgiveness? I will offer a few today, and I plan to write more on this in the next few days because I can’t possibly cover it all today so know that this is a part one of a series. I offer them as suggestions from a heart that acknowledges my own weakness, my humanness, my Incomplete grade on the course, but I offer them in my own pursuit of wholeness and in the hope and belief that they might help others.

1. Forgiveness is a process. It is complicated. If we are real about the hard stuff, we must all admit that we are unable in our humanness to deal the death blow to offense in one broad stroke. I have said before that we choose to forgive, and yes, that is true. We choose, but truthfully that choice is the beginning step. It is a necessary step, but it is only a beginning step that places us on the track of healing. Great offense requires that we choose again and again and again and again. When our buried alive emotions fly out of their grave, we must choose again to access God’s grace and forgive.

2. When we think of forgiveness, we tend to view it as one person or group or family that has been wronged by another. However, relationships are much more complicated than that. More often than not, both sides carry a measure of the “blame”.

3. There is a difference in a heart that vows never to forgive an offense and a heart that acknowledges its struggle to forgive but desires to. The process of forgiveness can be a real process that is happening in our hearts and coexists with our struggling emotions. God works with us in our weaknesses. Each step towards healing, however incomplete, is important.

4. The process of forgiveness requires us to feel – our losses, our grief, our hatreds – whether they be toward ourselves or others. The process of forgiveness confronts our hearts with our emotions, and this is very important. We are less than truthful when we deny the authenticity of our feelings. Acknowledging those emotions does open the door on the path of allowing healing to come into those places. I was recently troubled by a statement someone made to me about their recent hurt. “It’s really okay,” they said and then they offered their reasons on why it was no big deal. And it was a lie. It was a big deal, but they “needed” emotionally to just push it away, deny its pain. That is inauthentic and distances us from the grace of God which comes to heal us when we are able to admit our pain.

5. Perhaps the greatest temptation is to begin to see the offender(s) as all evil. We humans love black and white thinking. All evil or all good. If we can view a person as completely evil, it is easier to deny the need to deal with our pain. If they are all evil, then it doesn’t matter that they hurt me. As we process through our forgiveness issues, we learn to accept our own humanity and the humanity of others. When we view others as all good or all bad, we are, in reality, refusing to acknowledge anything bad about ourselves (for surely we are all good and our offender is all bad). The more mature view, which I do not altogether possess, is that there is a person or a group of people who has hurt us, but yet that person or that group has good qualities as well as the bad ones which are highlighted in our feelings. It is the higher road to be able to say, “They really hurt me and wronged me, but there was a time when we had a good relationship. I still can remember the good about that person in the midst of this very hurtful situation.”

That’s enough to chew on today. I’ll post more thoughts in the next couple of days, but for now let me say, stay in the process. It will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but in doing so, you will gain more of God’s heart as you humbly acknowledge your own. Forgiveness is a great key to freedom, use it!

My Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Mikki — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:04:51 +0000

In 1969, Paul Simon wrote a powerful song which he and Art Garfunkel recorded in 1970. The expression of Paul’s heart in the song conveys the message that he would be a friend when friends could not be found; that he, himself, would be a bridge over his friend’s troubled water.

I was so struck by this thought yesterday as I listened to a lovely lady share how she had endured so many difficult things, felt alone so often, but God had revealed to her through a prayer team at our church that He had been her bridge every time over those troubled waters. She had not, in fact, been alone. God was there.

How many times have we felt abandoned during our hard times? And truthfully, many people do abandon us, but one thing I have begun to ask God in the last couple of years is that He would show me where He was during dark moments in my past. I, too, find that He has been my bridge, and that often the way He has done that was through others as they became “bridges” for me to walk on. My heart was moved to write these thoughts…

The Bridge

I hear the water below me
The power of its rushing
Stirs the fear within me
Yet the other side
Beckons me to keep walking

This bridge under my feet
Gives me strength
Although it doesn’t completely
Take my fears away

Providing a place to step
Giving passage over the raging waters
Moving me onward to the other side

When I pause to look down at this bridge under my feet
I question whether it can hold me
And over the chasm it answers
Only with its presence

A voice within me rises up
Crying for a way to go back
But the former place
Has no solace any longer

Once on the other side
I look back at my bridge
“My God!” I cry,
“That was too dangerous!
How could you entrust me into
The hands of human bridges?"

His Spirit whispers to me
That it was One
In the form of a human bridge
Who laid himself down over the waters for me

And I realize that my steps
Across the bridge
Ripped another layer of self-reliance
From me

My trip across the troubled waters
Stirred within me wrong ideas I had
About You and others
And the bridge revealed to me
The truth of who You are
The reality of Your love

You gently remind me that Your path of rescue
Is always revealing
Revealing You
And revealing me
Your love, passion, strength, purpose
My fears, struggles, weaknesses, doubts

And I find that places within my dead, numb heart
Are renewed to live again
My understanding is clearer
My heart is becoming whole

I fall on my knees
And I thank You, Lord, for being my bridge over troubled waters, and
I thank You for those who bridged the waters for me

And I wrestle…

Struggling to come to another truth…

But finally I see…

And in surrender I release my thanksgiving to You

…for the troubled water itself

The Diary

Mikki — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:19:11 +0000

When I was a little girl, I had a diary. It was just a cheap cardboard bound little book with a lock. I kept the key hidden away. Had anyone really wanted to read my diary badly enough, the lock would have been simple to break, yet having a lock on the diary was a sign of power. It was my story and no one was allowed to read it.

Part of the intrigue of a diary is both the power of the writer to lock away their secrets and the risk of someone else finding the diary and reading the author’s most treasured secrets.

To me, there was always something mysteriously wonderful about my diary. For one thing, it was a place I could write my deepest secrets and thoughts in safety. Secondly, there was the beauty of the lock itself. The lock was power. My power. The power to tell my story and then hide it away. I always kept the key hidden far away from the actual diary. My diary could not betray me as long as I kept the key.

There was always the potential for a power shift. If someone else found my diary and my key, opened my diary and read it, then they would have the power of knowing my innermost thoughts.

Of course, diary keeping is quite different today. Online diaries and locked away passwords are the storage places and keys for today’s world, but the dynamics are really the same.

As I mused about the power of a diary this morning, I thought of the irony of it all. We all have a longing to tell our story, the longing to be known intimately, yet to do so is risky so we try our best to keep our story locked away. We don’t feel safe to share that story with just anyone. I remember one occasion in elementary school when I saw the horror on another little’s girl face when “the boys” found her diary and read her secrets, which amounted to who she was in love with that week. They taunted her and sang, “Na, na, na, na, na; we found your diary. You’re in love with Roger,” (or Mark, or whoever it happened to be that week).

And then there was always the possibility of reading about yourself in someone else’s diary. Perhaps they would tell of unfeigned love for you, or maybe they would say they hated you! It was all part of the intrigue.

Our stories are powerful and we often use them as pieces in a chess game. If I hide my story, I have power. If you discover my story, you have power to use it against me.

Perhaps the greatest power is when we are willing to purposefully share our stories. Sadly, this involves great risk, for to share our innermost self with someone else makes us vulnerable. Perhaps they will not treasure our story. The results can be pain and betrayal.

Our stories must first be written for our own hearts to acknowledge their beauty, purpose, and pain. Only then can they be safely shared with those whose lives our stories are destined to touch. And timing is important; in the Bible Daniel was instructed not to tell part of his story at that time and John gets a revelation that can’t be understood yet.

I recently read some research that indicated that in the telling of our stories, whether verbally or through writing, our brain is able to heal from past experiences that have left, as it were, scars on our lives. The right and left part of the brain reconnect in ways that actually bring healing to the brain.

And this morning I thought of how The Bible is, in a way, God’s diary. It contains His innermost thoughts and feelings. He continues to work so that everyone will have a copy of His story, and Jesus is the key that unlocks the story. So God gives us both His diary and His key. He gives us the power to know Him intimately and He models for us the power of story. We sometimes call that the power of testimony. Scripture teaches us that overcoming power comes through the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.

So today may we all listen for God’s whisper for perhaps He will speak to us to share our story with someone else and through the telling of that story, we can invite them into the wonder of God’s story for after all, stories are meant to be read.