Tag Archives: forgiveness

For 18 Years

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For 18 Years

Blessed are You
Lord our God
King of the Universe
for 18 years of marriage,
of love—
bitter / sweet
comforting / unsettling
lonely / intimate
full

Blessed are You,
for I have seen You
in Michael’s face
in his words
his steadfastness
forgiveness

Blessed are You
Lord our God
King of the Universe
for duck pond dates
pillow talk and pillow tears
Ted Lasso
role reversals
one-liners
friendship

Blessed are You
for we have loved and endured
each other
and each other’s families.
We have learned by participation
what hurts and what heals.
Seeing, seeing
seeing each other
and then again
forever

Tell My Body I’m Innocent

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Tell My Body I’m Innocent

Reflections – week 3

Welcome to the third week of reflections inspired by my current small groups. Together with some of my favorite women, I’m exploring these books: Father’s House: The Path That Leads Home, and The Whole Language. This is week three of eight. I’m finding joy here, and I’m pleased you’re with me on this journey.

Forgiven Future

“I am fully forgiven forever.”1 This is key #3 in Father’s House.

The exercises in the workbook are designed to walk me through past grievances, but I find myself feeling more guilt and shame for my potential to mess up, than for past behaviors. I feel like a walking liability, a mistake waiting to happen, impatience and selfishness and bitterness piled up on an over-filled plate, waiting to get bumped and spill everywhere.

I believe that forgiveness from God is complete. It doesn’t happen when or because I ask for it. It’s done for all people for all time, and my invitation is simply to accept awareness of it. But I realize I have not allowed this to permeate my present and my future. I see everything in front of me through the filter of my imperfection. And I believe my capacity to act without love means I deserve a diminished life. Father’s House declares, “In Papa’s House your past doesn’t stand a chance.”2 Could I believe that in Papa’s house my future doesn’t stand a chance?

The ability to walk forward is not only dependent on being untied from the past, but also on a clear way ahead. Papa doesn’t expect me to walk embarrassed, afraid, tentative—advancing slowly to improve the chance of catching myself when I trip. I have believed I must hold back because getting things right is more important than anything else. But if my future is forgiven and I am “innocent and pure forever,”3 I can’t possibly make things any more “right” than they already are.

I can walk with confidence, run with abandon, knowing that tripping is expected. God isn’t surprised when I make mistakes or protect my ego or forget to love. All of this is understood and received into His expansiveness. He is not keeping track. He is not expecting perfection. He is not asking me to go back to the starting line and try again. He is not putting his hand up and requiring me to kneel and beg forgiveness before I go on.

I have tried to avoid forgiveness by getting things right. I have believed that if I need to think about forgiveness, something has gone wrong. But Jesus didn’t shy away from forgiveness. He gave it out left and right, and not because people were asking for it. He never suggested we should be trying to not need to be forgiven. Perfection—“rightness”—is a distraction, a black hole, handcuffs.

Tension

A few months ago I began to notice tension in my body. The tension wasn’t new, but my notice was. I first became aware of it when I was lying in bed. I noticed I could allow my scalp and forehead and cheeks and shoulders and arms and back and legs and feet to relax. Five minutes later, I would become aware of the tension again, and again I could relax. After a day or two, I realized the tension was always there, but when I took notice of it I could release it. I don’t know what prompted this awareness, but it became an ongoing invitation to rest. Perhaps it was a result of internalizing freedom in Father’s House, knowing “It is finished”—what Jesus completed is my starting point and my resting place. I belong in Papa’s house. I’m exactly where I need to be. I sit in Papa’s house calm and light, because I’m no longer juggling while climbing stairs and holding my breath.

Holding

Children who have been abused often speak of a moment in their healing when they realize that the abuse was not their fault, not their destiny, not normal, not what they deserved. It becomes something that happened to them, but it is no longer their secret identity, the truth of who they are, or the predictor of who they will be.

Gregory Boyle tells the story of a kid named Sharky, whose father continued to find and terrorize the family, despite restraining orders. One day Sharky came home to find his father hiding there, waiting to interrogate him. When he couldn’t take any more, he ran to a neighbor’s house and called his mom, who arranged a meeting place. When they both arrive, “She just holds him there, in the gym bleachers, as he sobs all the more and her only message is this: ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that.’” Many years later, Sharky is alone in a prison cell, and “comes a message from God… a singular expression of tenderness. God holding a sobbing Sharky and saying only this: ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that.’ Sharky tells me later that this has become the notion of God that holds him still. It fills him enough to say finally to his own father, ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through all that.’ The Tender One… is sorry that we go through what we do.”4 He is holding us in the bleachers. He is speaking the truth that neither “abuser” nor “abused” is our identity, releasing us to healing and wholeness.

Innocent

“Father God doesn’t just consider you forgiven,” write the authors of Father’s House, “but He sees you as completely innocent—as though you had never sinned.”5 I don’t know what this means. It can’t mean I’m perfect. It can’t mean I’m not human. It can’t mean I don’t need to heal. Surely God sees my wounds, because He touches them and restores health. Ultimately, I think innocence is about intimacy. Innocence is, “There is nothing between you and Father God, for He sees you as holy, flawless, and restored,”6—forever. Innocence is an invitation to uncouple from shame. “Shame and intimacy will never share a seat at the same table. You have to let go of one to have the other.”7

Gregory Boyle writes, “Unshakeable goodness is our royal nature.” When we see this, he says, “We then undertake the search for innocence in the other. We cease to find the guilty party. We no longer divide into camps: Heroes and Villains. We end up only seeing heroes. We look for the unchangeable goodness that’s always there in the other… In this, we find the unbearable beauty of our own life.”8

Intimacy seems fragile to me, a rare treasure—not something that can be promised forever. But God Of The Impossible is promising infinite intimacy, and He is suggesting that innocence and intimacy are inextricably connected. Nothing between us.

Rest

My innocence, and the innocence of every human being, is an invitation to rest. Boyle writes, “It will always be less exhausting to love than to find fault. When we see fault, we immediately believe that something has to be done about it. But love knows that nothing is ever needed.”9 I no longer need to find fault. Instead, I find goodness. There is nothing left to fix, and my muscles relax in gratitude. I am not a tripping hazard. I am forgiven, innocent, whole. I breathe this in and release “fixing” so I can see love. Everywhere, and in everyone, love.

Endnotes:
1Father’s House, page 46
2Father’s House, activation #3
3Ibid
4The Whole Language, pages 23, 24
5Father’s House, page 46
6Colossians 1:22 TPT, emphasis mine
7Father’s House, page 50
8The Whole Language, pages 40, 41
9The Whole Language, page 41

Hope: Past or Future?

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I lost a dear friend six years ago. Not to death, but to misunderstanding. I agreed with someone on a group text, not knowing that person was at odds with another friend on the same group text. It’s amazing how fast something that seems strong can dissolve. My friend’s perception was that I had taken sides against her, and her response was immediate and caustic. I went into an emotional tailspin.

What to do? I wanted to acknowledge the pain my friend was feeling, but I didn’t know how. I bought a potted flower, wrote “I love you” in a card, and bravely went to her front door. Her husband received the gift, and I cried all the way home. Choosing vulnerability has a way of opening the floodgates sometimes.

I had told her once that I deeply valued our friendship and would fight for it should the need arise. I meant it, yet I didn’t know what it meant. What does it look like to stand beside someone when they hurt you? How do you disentangle a misunderstanding when both parties are licking their wounds and yelping if anyone gets close?

My friend didn’t respond to the flowers and card, and I felt lost. I was hurting from her bitter text message and mostly I just lurched along with my emotions. One day I was angry and self-righteous. The next I was practicing gratitude for the years of friendship we did have. Sometimes I made excuses for her hurtful words and ensuing silence. Other times I rehearsed spiteful responses. I thought I wanted reconciliation, but I suppose what I really wanted was for her to apologize, magically leave the pain in the past, and move on. Instead I was left in the discomfort of unresolved conflict, and silence.

A year or two after the one-text-detonates-a-friendship-bomb scenario, I decided that with my therapist’s support I would seek to repair the friendship. I emailed my friend and asked if we could talk about something that was weighing on me. She suggested I see a counselor for anything I needed to work through, and said she would be available in four months if I wanted to talk about only light-hearted things. I had to hand it to her for having crystal clear boundaries!

I wasn’t interested in talking only about rainbows and unicorns—as one of my friends put it—so that was the end of that. I told her I appreciated her honesty and moved on… sort of. I continued to feel uneasy whenever I thought about us. She would text me occasionally about something innocuous, like a local event or the weather. I felt anxious every time she contacted me, and uncomfortable developing what felt like a completely fake “friendly” relationship.

Over the years I have continued “trying” to forgive, and have continued feeling hurt. When someone says they “forgave,” sounding utterly confident in forgiveness as a past event, I am puzzled. What have they figured out that I haven’t? Why is this failed relationship still hanging over my head? Every now and then I pray about it and journal some new angle to the whole mess. But I still feel captive to it. Until I read these words in Anne Lamott’s book Traveling Mercies: “…forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past.”

These words begin to reframe how I think about the loss of safety in friendship. Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past. I can stop rehearsing what I could have done differently, said better, or not said at all. I can stop grieving mismanaged words and allow them to be what they were. Emotional pain is an acceptable human experience. Being misunderstood is an acceptable human experience.

Here’s the thing: forgiveness is not giving up all hope of having a different future. I can sit here, between the past that simply is, and the future that simply will be, and fret about neither. I can release hope for a different past, giving myself and my friend permission to have an unresolved misunderstanding; and I can maintain hope for the future—not because I can force healing, but because when I open my hands to receive the past for what it was, I simultaneously give myself permission to receive the future for whatever it will be.

Is forgiveness in this relationship done and in the past? No. It could be one day, but at this moment it’s still a work in progress. Perfectionism begs to take center stage and rehearse the un-done “right” past and the unlikely “right” future. And I fight back, learning to forgive myself and others, and live openhanded. I begin to think about this new definition of forgiveness—giving up all hope of having had a different past—as it relates to parenting. When the kids hit and scream, ignore me, make messes, dawdle: in those moments could I release the hope of a different past few minutes? Could I forgive them and myself this way? Could I embrace both friendship and parenting as the freedom to love in this moment, giving up all hope of the last moment being different?

I realize that I have invested much in hoping for a different past, grieving my behavior and the behavior of others. But I am not my behavior. This could change the way I look at the last six years and the last six minutes. I am not what people say or think about me, and I am not what my behavior says about me. I don’t have to revisit the choices I already made today—like when to get up, how many shows the kids can watch, looking at my phone before prayer time—and wonder if they are “right.” Or wonder what they say about who I am. I can release those moments and face forward. My hope is not in a different past, but in living this moment open-handed, loved by a wild and lavish God. Living now is lighter.

That’s God

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Last evening my sister, my husband, and I attended a screening of the documentary Since I Been Down, which follows the lives of young men and boys from the Hilltop neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington, to prison. For more info, visit https://www.sinceibeendown.com. There’s also an excellent synopsis of the storyline here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14519366/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. What follows is my musing after seeing the film.

When someone who has a 777-year prison sentence lives with purpose and hope, that’s God.

When a mother, whose innocent son was shot and killed, forgives—that’s God.

When tattooed men in a prison classroom understand justice as listening to the person next to them, that’s God.

When men who are quarantined from society, for life, choose to give of themselves to the people around them, that’s God.

When men of different races, from opposing gangs, covered with tattoos that censure each other, sit at the same table and joke together, that’s God.

When an older gang member slips $5 to a middle school gang member because he knows that kids’ parents aren’t putting food on the table, that’s God.

When a man who has been shown that he is worth nothing, finds that he is worth something, that’s God.

When fear and self-protection give way to curiosity, and then to the intimacy of shared humanity, that’s God.

When a grandmother forgives the mom who beat her three-year-old granddaughter to death, that’s God.

When a woman stands with the oppressed, and she voices that we are all perpetrators and we are all victims, that’s God.

When a lifer feels free for the brief moments he stands in front of his peers in a prison classroom, that’s God.

God was the Life in this film, though His name was never mentioned.

For where there is courage, compassion, and creativity, that’s God.

Where there is forgiveness, faithfulness, and friendship, that’s God.

Where there is hope, humility, and humor, that’s God.

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey visits the richest man in town—Mr. Potter—and begs for help when he is at the end of his rope. After grilling George about his assets, and finding the only monetary asset he has is a $500 life insurance policy, Mr. Potter tells him, “You’re worth more dead than alive.” George Bailey stumbles from Mr. Potter’s office and finds his way to a bridge, where he would have ended his life, were it not for a tattered angel who showed him his worth without reference to money.

Many men and women have been told by those of us with money that they are worth more dead than alive.

When beauty and passion arise in a place where men are left for dead, that’s God.

God, who was tried, tortured, and killed, emerged from a guarded tomb, alive. And He stands with those who are tried, sentenced, locked away, and guarded, and—through them—shows us what it looks like to be alive.