Forgiveness comes in layers. Sometimes you forgive and you
feel great and you walk a little further down the road and you find you need to
forgive again. It doesn’t mean the first time wasn’t real or genuine. It
doesn’t mean you’re a fraud or a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at doing
this whole forgiving thing. It can’t be commanded or flipped on with a switch.
And you might be tempted to feel guilty because it’s not the proper Christian
protocol to struggle with forgiveness, but wouldn’t we rather be raw and honest
with where we’re at than say it’s easy to forgive and make ourselves to be
hypocrites?
Forgiveness is definitely the destination but sometimes
people forget to tell you that it can be a long trek up the side of a mountain,
not a Star Trek teleportation. That’s where I’m at—somewhere up on the
treacherous face, telling myself I’m not angry anymore but discovering my foot
rubbed raw, blistered from the continual effort of placing one foot in front of
the other. Sometimes the Lord lets forgiveness cost you something. I’m staring cost
in the face—the awareness every day that my life has been restricted by the
consequences of someone else’s poor decisions. And with it the confusing
emotions of feeling unloved, un-provided for, made false promises, used.
And so every day I have the choice to forgive again. Will I
let this make me bitter? Will I let it steal my joy? Will I allow it to become
an excuse or a reason to be pitied? Or, rather, will I accept this circumstance
as sovereign? That beyond what has happened to me, beyond what seems like the
fault of another human being, there lies Y’shua’s filter on my life. Here is
the truth—that God in His sovereignty has allowed this season of constraint.
And so it follows that there is something He wants me to learn from this
constraint. Or better yet, some way He wants to make Himself known to me in a
way He could not before. What if in the very face of feeling unprovided for,
the Lord wants to lavish me with His own provision? What if He wants me in a
position of leaning on Him? Instead of succumbing to feeling overwhelmed or
outsized by this problem, I stare at the rock face with expectancy. The Lord
will show up. He will move. He will make a way out. That is His character, His
way. And what if with this coming foothold of provision brings the very grace
to forgive and let go of another layer of pain.
