Forgiveness, the Wisdom of God

Forgiveness is a trust.  A merciful action based on a decision to extend mercy, because mercy has been extended to us—mercy that gave us an unlosable salvation—we reciprocate God’s love.  We love God back as we forgive others.

Forgiveness is as simple as loving God back 
for the mercy that has been extended to us.

When we reduce love of others, love of our neighbour, to the attitude and action of forgiveness, we live a powerful love that works two powerful ways: it delivers a compelling love of hope and grace in all our relationships, plus it is the trust of God, which is God’s only requirement of us when we have accepted our salvation—God’s wisdom for OUR own good.

Forgiveness is the wisdom of God that crushes 
evil’s design to steal hope, kill love, and destroy peace.

Forgiveness is the wisdom of trust.  We must trust God to truly forgive, making forgiveness one of discipleship’s most important performance indicators.  Those who take their faith seriously, seriously trust God to the extent of understanding and appreciating the value of the mercy that has been extended to them as an individual.  It motivates behaviours of reciprocity because God has been so good to us.

In trusting God, a door is opened to us that opens up to us access to a power we can only receive through an iron clad trust of God.  God must be our god, our only god, and this pure allegiance can only be lived one moment at a time.  We march to God’s tune alone when we extend the mercy God’s extended to us to others, each and every time.

~

Living wisely is living a life of mercy repelling daily the instincts to harm others, and in resisting the deliberate holding of hurts, disappointments and betrayals that cling to us from relationships we can’t control during our lifetimes.

NOW, ABOUT JUSTICE

Justice remains eternally important, and in forgiveness what we’re doing is transferring the debts others refuse to pay to us to God, even as, in forgiveness, we repay ALL our debts.

Recognising we’re here for a finite time, the real point of life is recognising that we will MEET God in eternity, and it will be there that a cosmic and irreversible transaction will take place.  True justice and true accounting occur.  It is a trust of faith to know that this does take place, as it is a trust to live as if it will occur, to the reverence and glory of God.

God knows that we must leave justice to eternity.  This is the trust of the requirement, and there’s wisdom in it, because we in our human lives need to uncouple ourselves from the demands that justice be done to our satisfaction, because God knows we will never be satisfied other than via true reconciliation—which beyond justice, is only available on earth when parties reconcile by making peace, which is often not possible because one or both do not confess and repent of their sin.

Justice is infinitely important to God, and at times, and in God’s way, God opens up opportunities for injustice to be reconciled.  That is, in the fullness of time, and by the circumstances of change, where God makes injustice plain to everyone, those who have faced injustice get their opportunity to love their enemy well with the truth even as they have forgiven their enemy’s debts, having transferred those debts to God to judge.

FORGIVENESS, THE WISDOM OF GOD

Where this needs to start and end is in the truth that says, “The days are evil.”  Paul speaks most urgently of our need to live as wise, not unwise, “making the most of every opportunity...”

Two issues that are under the guise of “evil” are temptation and persecution.  One we have a problem with as individuals, the other individuals and entities cause us problems.

The key temptations in life get under our guard and hurt and then harden our hearts.  Hardness of heart leads to an incapacity to forgive.  The worst of it is an absolute loss of insight—that inability to see how merciful God has been with us.

Persecutions occur in many different ways, not least through gaslighting, but there are manipulations, isolation, physical injury, intimidation, etc.  Persecutions can and often do lead to disheartening that usually boomerangs back as a hardened heart.  Victims respond to the abuse that is done to them by what’s called, “reactive abuse.”  Forgiveness is the wisdom of God that fortifies a victim of abuse from reacting.

A reminder of the gospel from John 3:16-18 (NIV):

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.  Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.”

Forgiveness is the key way we guard our hearts (Proverbs 4:23; Philippians 4:7), and the key truth to return to is the mercy of God.  Indeed, Paul highlights from the first eleven chapters of Romans, having set out a forensically perfect case for the gospel, that everything that God has already done is more than sufficient to motivate us to live a life of forgiveness, which is love, sincerity, gentleness, gratitude, and grace, etc, and everything else about virtuous intent and demeanour from Romans 12-16.

In terms of a living modus operandi, forgiveness is the unbeatable wisdom of God.

~

Forgiveness for a Christian is as simple as loving God back.  There is no better way of loving God than loving others through the forgiveness that God commands us to do.

The call of God on a person’s life

I’ve wrestled with this long enough.  Time to write it.

I’ve had a few people say to me that God is more interested in who I am, who we ARE as individuals, than he is interested in what I or WE as individuals do.

It’s true, of course.  But there’s a nuance to be considered when it comes to calling.

It’s simply this: in terms of calling, what a person does IS who they are.  If a person serves God to the exclusion of other things, their DOING is inherently part of their BEING.

I cannot overemphasise this matter.

Now, of course, it is also true—just to bring in and hold tensions that are there—that is opposites that are equally true—as in ‘both/and’ truths—it is also true that our identity in Christ far surpasses DOING.  It really does.  God’s less interested in what we do “for God” than our loving others, for one instance, and I’d cite Matthew 5:23-24 as the prooftext there.

BUT—in an article like this there are always buts.

If a person has a genuine calling of God on their life, they will not be able to refuse that call.  They can try all they like, and I can tell you personally, I’ve tried to head toward Tarshish very many times, but neither God nor wise ones around me allowed that to happen.  They said, “You need to repent and make turn for Nineveh.”  Leaving my calling never stuck.

I’d go so far as to say that when you’ve got a calling of God on your life, you can be cast out by “man,” but you can’t be cast out of your calling.  What I mean is “men” may cast you out, but God never does.

I know there are people who feel called but who may not serve well, or who may even do harm and think they’re helping.  Repentance is the sign of the called.  A heart that says, “If I do any wrong, I will repent, seek to make restitution, and restore people and situations.”  That’s actually a hallmark of the calling of God in my view, because what’s inherent to calling is the commitment to ‘do no [more] harm’.

But the thrust of this article on calling is the person IS what they do.  Their being is in WHAT they’re doing.  They are highly operational.  Their intent is set on making a tangible difference, which in ministry terms is often a tangibility delivered in intangible ways.

Not least a person called of God shows their call by DOING, given that their BEING is judged by others and God by how they lived their life, what they DID and how they did it, especially in terms of holiness, faith, and repentance.

This is what happens when a person prays the prayer, “Lord, having recognised Your call on my life, my life is Yours now, I pledge to do everything to follow You.”  One could argue that this calling is every Christian’s domain, yet how few take it seriously.

But the one who hears from God, the one who is affirmed by wise others, the one who is affirmed by called others, the gifted one, receives that call because they cannot deny it.

Such a person will always find a way to serve their God.

“... as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua 24:15

Reflecting over a lifetime, one decade at a time

Having been a human being well over fifty years and having had vocations aligned to the psychology of humanity for nearly half my life, I can attest to the fact that basically no human being feels “perfect” at any time.  Being human isn’t ever easy.  We never stand apart from our humanity.  We can never unthink, unknow, or unfeel our way in this life.

Then we die.

Not to depress you, but at this juncture of life—at the end of a year—it’s normal and natural to engage in reflection.  Those who don’t, miss out.

I like to take a “life scan” at the end of each year, and that’s about reviewing our lives at 10-year intervals and imagining what life might hold in future 10-year intervals.  A life scan is a reflective activity designed to ease us into reflecting over our lives to this point, and then to impel our thinking forward to what might be.

Here’s mine for this year:

2022

A very significant year for several reasons.  Mum died.  A week after Mum’s funeral, my third grandchild was born.  The key word I would use for this year is “conclusion” as many things reached a state of conclusion.  Good and not-so-good, but mainly good, and there are even good aspects of Mum’s passing—family were there, and she’d lived a life of love at the very least.  In so many ways, some things that started ten years ago concluded.  But with conclusions there are also fresh starts, so 2023 begins with expectation.

2012

The year I turned 45 was significant because it was also a setting up year.  I qualified as a counsellor at the year’s end, my wife was pregnant with our son, and at the end of the year, after an arduous season of nearly ten years, my prayers were answered in the achievement of a pastoral position of my dreams.  This season was punctuated by a season of hope that lasted months.

2002

Wow, 20 years ago it was a leap back into another life!  I was in my first marriage, leading quite a jet-setting secular life, and my three daughters were in Primary School.  In some ways, it was the happiest and most content life but deep down within I wasn’t living the life of my calling.  I didn’t know it yet, but my life would be turned upside down in 12 months.  From this point in life, climbing the corporate ladder with one of the largest oil companies in the world, becoming a pastor would have been the last thing in my thoughts.

1992

Blast from the past again, here, I was working in mining maintenance on the tools in the hot northwest, I’d been married two years and my firstborn was born in this year.  I was 25 and a powerlifting bodybuilder.  There was no sign at this point of the desire to take up career two or career three.  I was content as a tradesman fixing large mechanical machines.

1982

I was in Year 10 High School this year and it was the year before I commenced trade training.  Music and cricket were big in my world.  I had good High School friends and we usually smoked cigarettes outside school at lunchtime.  By this stage in life I did know I wanted to be a fitter and turner (just like Dad).  At this stage in life, being married and a father in ten years was the farthest thing from my mind.

1972

I was five years old commencing Kindergarten.  Life was very isolated for Mum and Dad up in Dampier with no other family and Dad working a lot of overtime.  My younger brother and I were very active boys who loved to play outside in the heat.  Looking back at the family movies at the time, with Mum gone, I still can’t get over how long ago it was, but how that time seems to have flashed by.

1962

I wasn’t born yet, but my parents were “an item” and my existence was now possible.  Mum and Dad were courting whilst living in a small mining town called Bullfinch.  Dad was an apprentice and he and Mum enjoyed going to the pictures together.  Mum worked for the Bullfinch post office.

~

A life scan doesn’t just look back, it looks forward too.  So, I’ll project forward as far as I reasonably can.

2032

At this point, our son will be an adult, and there will be more grandchildren, perhaps another three, making seven overall.  Being 65, I hope to still be fully engaged as a minister for God whether in the church or secular life or both.  We’ll be 25 years married.  And I’m sure, with ten years more life lived, there will be a range of additional losses to grieve.

2042

I still expect to be working, though part time, especially serving God.  I anticipate I’ll be a great grandfather.

2052

If I’m still alive, I’ll be 85.  Still hope to be serving God in some capacity.  Hope to be married 45 years by this point.

2062

Even though I’ve covenanted to be alive still at this point (till 2067 actually), I really don’t expect to be alive at 92, but I’m willing if God allows.

~

The most humbling thing about life is the older you get the more you realise how short life is.  But when you’re young, a whole lifetime seems like longer than eternity itself.

Purpose is more important than Comfort

The recent psychological science attests to the fact that stress is not always bad for us, and indeed it can be the key motivational factor that helps us perform.  This is good news because we all live at least moderately stressful lives, and stress is not something we can control as it’s usually very much, as an input, about external factors.

The point is this: we can achieve in our thinking an emphasis of stress empowering us rather than stress damaging us.  It isn’t ‘positive psychology’ because the science is proven.

We turn stress into motivation
when we convert fear into courage.

It all depends on whether we think stress is harmful for us or whether we think stress could help us if only it’s harnessed, it’s as simple as that.  If we think our stress is harmful, that stress tends to have a toxic effect on our health and vitality.  But if we can work with our stress and use it to drive our motivation, we facilitate oxytocin release for our benefit, moderating our body’s cortisol release.  Our bodies are designed to respond well.

Where this gets positively biblical is when we start to read verses like James 1:2-4, which begins with, “Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds...”  The trouble is, such a thought is so foreign to us that we can scratch our heads and ask ourselves what on earth was James talking about.  “Joy”? ... in “trials of many kinds”?

I see myself in this just as much as you possibly do.  And I think the biggest issue we have these days is we’ve become so used to comfort.  Yet if we were to do some special forces training, we would soon learn to adapt to the stress—we would need to just to survive.  Fortunately, very few of us will ever be subjected to the ignominy of that kind of environment.

Talking negatively about comfort in these ways isn’t really where I want to land this article.

It’s only half the story.

The other half of the story is what puts the dispatch of our comfort into its proper perspective.  Literally nothing else matters in our lives other than meaning and purpose.

If we are connected to a meaning that is intrinsically us, to a purpose that gets us out of bed and motivated to do our best each and every day, we have all we need to live.  We are sustained by that which comes from within ourselves, and there’s really little anyone can do to extinguish our flame, so long as we are in touch with that pilot light deep inside us.

Sure, many of us must rally against the tyranny of trauma, learn how to contend with our triggers, harnessing the empowering aspects of our bodies, and learn to believe again in what we CAN do as opposed to being disabled by what we can’t do.  Our lives aren’t ruined.  It’s only a story, a narrative, that we say to ourselves, that we’re conditioned to believe, that we allow to go unchecked, that we give permission by default to direct our lives.  Negative narratives will run our lives if we let them.

What we can do to contend with this disempowering default is be reminded that we are alive for such a time as this.  We have ONE life.  This one.  The one we’re living.  And anyone subscribing to the Christian life knows there’s an enemy that just wants to incessantly crush every human being, and there’s a much larger price on the head of anyone who lives for God, who is an insurgent of grace against this enemy’s design of subjugation.

Our purpose and the meaning of our lives is urgent.  It ought to get us up each day with a drive to live.  And I understand those in today’s predicament who can’t because I’ve been there.  I’ve been to depression, to grief, to hell... and back.  When we’re battling for the will to live, we must have faith that the trials we face have their purpose in our overall purpose.

My experience is that God wastes none of our suffering.  It’s not just a cliché.  It just takes a few years, or at most a decade or two, consider David or Joseph.  I think it took about 13 years and 17 years respectively.  But it was their purpose.  Their comfort wasn’t their goal, their purpose was.

It’s worth continuing in our purpose rather than be discouraged by our lack of comfort because the years grind on toward the goal anyway.  Going the way of comfort won’t achieve for us our purpose, meaning, or goals.  Those years of comfort arrive just as much as our purposeful end does.  Do we want a satisfied contentedness for achieving our purpose or pungent regret for the ‘achievement’ of our comfort?  Again, we have ONE life.

A focus on our comfort will lead to overwhelm,
a focus on our purpose leads to overcoming.

More important than our comfort is our purpose and the meaning beyond our comfort.  This is not to say that we don’t need safety, because we do.  Our safety is needed to live our purpose.  But living our purpose affords a way of sanctuary and part of our purpose is to continue to find that way.

No matter what is happening in your life right now, no matter how hard it may be, don’t forget to sniff the flowers and look up at that blue or grey or black sky.  The earth and life are the same every day, and your purpose is here.

The grief journey – a thousand ways to acceptance

Is it possible to arrive at the acceptance stage of grief without having experienced the preceding stages?  It’s an absorbing question begging exploration.

Right upfront I would say that it is entirely possible to arrive at acceptance without having experienced all the stages of grief, or of having only experienced a little of some of them.

One categorical question must be asked, however, and that is was the loss that was grieved truly a loss?  Sometimes losses occur and they are truly losses in that we can bear the reality of them, and we move immediately to acceptance, usually because there wasn’t the bond of intimacy with that thing or person we’ve lost.  Then, there are losses that involve cavernous grief and torrents of despair.

Let us imagine the loss we have experienced involves intense grief.
Let’s imagine that there are nuances to the grief process that need to be validated.

The first is that there may be a strong tone of one of the stages, perhaps it’s anger, or perhaps it’s depression, and the other stages don’t show up as much.  This might be about the particular situational features of the loss we are experiencing.

The second thing is, it might be our way to grieve through bargaining, or denial, or depression, or anger, or we may simply hold naturally to a theology of loss that has us arriving quickly at acceptance.  This might be about how we, as individual persons, with our personalities, experience grief, signifying that we all grieve differently.

None of this is right or wrong.
There are no more valid ways of grieving than others.

The tussle of grief is the meandering journey toward acceptance.  It is so frustrating for so many.  On one hand many losses feature the need to remember our loved one, and yet on the other hand we also strongly desire resolution through reaching the acceptance stage.

There are a thousand ways to acceptance.  There is no defined way.  There are no rules to abide by to get there.  It’s more a nebulous, always uncharted journey we ‘arrive at’, never too soon, and it can feel as though it’s a much longer journey than it needed to be.

There are people who will characteristically feel angrier in certain situations of loss especially where there is injustice, and in other situations of loss the grief will feature more bargaining or more depression.  All these are immeasurable.

The feature of grieving that advances us to acceptance quicker and more fully is the nurturing of forgiveness for matters beyond our control.  In such situations, a person looks at the reality of the situation and accepts what they cannot change, or they work toward it.

Part of this peace is nurturing gratitude for what we DO have,
to counteract the confounding feelings of grief that overwhelm.

One of the things the grief teaches us is empathy through connection with compassion for others who are suffering.  Our own suffering opens the eyes of our heart, and the gift of empathy is given to us.  The Bible truth of “it’s more blessed to give than to receive” comes into frame.

To a certain degree we need to experience some curiosity for the rest of the world we’re connected with.  That is, whilst we are sufficiently broken in grief, we also hold the tension of reality for others, sensing that connection with others’ suffering is a key to facilitating the resolution of our own suffering.  This is the reason many of us were connected to service or called to ministry in the first place.

A word to the person who is suffering grief right now: don’t be judged that you are grieving wrong, holding grudges, stubbornly refusing to move forward.  Grief is like a piece of string where we can’t see the ends.  We don’t know how long it is.

Part of the mastery of grief is accepting that it is a mystery, both in process and in timeline.

If the way you grieve isn’t the same as others you have watched or observed, don’t be discouraged.  Try not to be influenced about how others experience loss and grief, for theirs is their own journey.  Try to be free of whatever social norms for grief that might encumber you.  Allow yourself freedom of judgement in your journey in your grief.

Hope when you’ve got nothing left

There are times when I’ve got nothing left.  Mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically.  I feel like a wreck and there’s no hope for today let alone tomorrow.  All purpose and meaning are vanquished, insight is annulled, motivation crushed.  It’s like a living death.  It’s like life has been consumed and there’s nothing to be lived for.  It’s like everything is limits, there are limits and impediments everywhere, and it’s like everything is frustrated, but frustration is no longer frustrating because to be frustrated there would need to be a hope that’s disappointed.  When there is no hope, there is no disappointment.  This is what it feels like when I’ve got nothing left.

And yet, the theme of my life is “tomorrow” beckons with fresh fire.  And whether that “tomorrow” is actually tomorrow or a week or an hour from now doesn’t matter.  We know it will come.  Resurrection has come this way for me a thousand times.

I’ve experienced this so many times I know it’s part of the same old rhythm.  I can trust that recovery will come because it does come, because it HAS come so very many times now.  And still, I need to tell myself afresh because with literally no insight I can be lulled into a sense of futility and it can seem as though recovery is a light year away.

BUT – one thing that needs to be remembered is this:

If there’s anything we can really trust about the future, it’s the past.  Past patterns are the best predictors of future inevitabilities.

There IS hope because there’s always hope, and whether we see that hope or not is inconsequential.  That hope IS there.  Sometimes we need to be reminded from an external source that it’s there, but it IS there.

Having nothing left is NOT a disaster.

It can actually be a very good thing.  I mean this in a very specific way.  When we acknowledge that we have nothing left and yet we’re not panicked by such a reality, when there’s a sense of realisation and even resignation, we don’t get in our own way.  We experience patience even if there’s a vacuum of hope.

We let go of our frustration, of our anger, of our entitlement that things be different to what they are, and we let go of our insistence that our world be ordered in any way we’d have it ordered.  Letting go is like a resignation.  We walk away and we don’t have any thoughts that will torment us.  It’s like resignation has met acceptance.  We may not like it, but the important thing is we’re no longer consumed by it.

So, the fact that we have nothing left is not the end of our world.

Though we experience a complete lack of hope, paradoxically we’re walking in a more mature hope than we were before.  We’re ready for whatever life might throw at us because we no longer protect ourselves against those things we have no control over.  We admit that life can and will surprise us, and I think this is what resilience truly is.

So, even though you may have nothing left, even though you may have lost hope, don’t despair, because you may have a deeper sense of acceptance now than ever before.

There are so many things over which we have no control.  Resilience then is truly grounded in the repetitive experience of simply bearing the weight of unfavourable circumstances.  It’s the mere fact that we can bear these without them crushing us indefinitely.

So it’s okay that we have nothing left, and indeed it’s an incredible affirmation of our resilience that we can bear it, that we can sit in it, insisting on nothing, because we literally have nothing.