Forgiveness is the vehicle to enable the design of life, which is healing unto wholeness. If it were not the case, it would not be written on the hearts of our lives. Bitterness and resentment take us into many manifestations of hell, but forgiveness leads to healing, wholeness, peace.
Forgiveness beyond screaming for justice amid
injustice because Faith says, “God sees ALL.”
The trouble is, often for such healing to take place, we must borrow a hope we do not have, and this is hard when we are spiritually weak. When life has been unfair, it’s hard to take the road less travelled, but it is essential if we are to take that right path—that path that leads to life.
Sometimes it is only one person’s shabby treatment of us that takes us down the slippery slope to a despair that jettisons hope and sabotages any vestige of faith we had. This is a reality; a temptation we all face, and an experience we have all probably dabbled in.
Why is it that one person or one situation
has so much power over us? We are not alone.
The simplistic answer is we “gave” the person or the situation too much power, but it is not as simple as that a lot of the time. There are situations that should be trustworthy that prove not to be, or people who should be trustworthy and yet who default on that trust.
Whichever way it is, it is not good when we find ourselves in a situation where we need healing. But that is life. Add to this, it is not good if we find ourselves locked into bitterness, grief, resentment, and the like. But that too is life. Yet healing is an opportunity.
There is a time for bitterness and resentment,
but it is not good to stay there.
Healing is the opportunity for growth.
We don’t live in a perfect world, yet by default so many of us sorely desire it, and so many of us truly need it, yet alas, that is what the world isn’t. The world and the situations of our lives can plunge us into an abyss beyond reckoning.
How are we to reconcile that which breaks us?
How are we to be put back together?
These are questions for all people who find themselves at a loss for what life does to them. For how the situations of life prove heartrending. For how some of the people in our lives leave us undone and without recourse to recovery. For how loss rips hope from our clutches and leaves us in the pit of grief’s sullen despair.
How do we heal these massive impasses
to achieve the cherished peace we desire?
I think from my own personal experience it is all about motivation. If peace as its own reward is sought it will be found. It will be searched for. It will be worth the sacrifices we need to make to obtain it.
Forgiveness is at the heart of peace because
forgiveness itself is at the heart of healing.
Forgiveness is a wisdom of God because it agrees with the reality that says, “Not all things are within my own personal control, and I need to be okay with that.” Looked at from the opposite direction, to not forgive, to not accept what cannot be changed, is to face-off with the madness of attempting to deny and defy the inevitable. It leads only to maladaptive responses and exhaustion. It makes no sense from a common-sense standpoint. It leads only to harm.
GOD WILL HEAL US IF ONLY WE WILL LET HIM
There is a way of seeing life that leads to life.
Another way of saying this is,
entering forgiveness facilitates the abundant life.
The abundant life, as the phrase suggests,
is the life we should all want.
It is the life we can all have.
In many ways we are instruments of our own frustration when it comes to our responses to the things that occur to us in our lives. The wisest response is to play what many are calling “the long game,” which is not coined from the sport of golf, though golf has a long game aspect about it.
The long game in spiritual terms is taking a whole-of-life view of life and allowing that perspective to guide a person every moment. With such perspective a person does not act the way that the moment often dictates—to react emotionally, for instance, as we are given to do on occasion.
The long game leads us to make sacrifices for the good, as investments of faith, in a future not yet written or realised. When we employ the long game, we practice a wisdom that looks distinctly like faith, and when such sacrifice becomes a habit, we find we and others are abundantly better for it. We find we can give up a lot of things that would otherwise be cheap relics, in preference for the spiritual rewards we will one day receive in great wealth.
Such spiritual blessings are worth the wait.
What the long game provides us is a way of life where we are finally willing to give up what we could have in the hope of getting something significantly better. Faith is involved because there are no guarantees. And even as we give up what we cannot keep to gain what we cannot lose, blessings of spiritual wellbeing are heaped onto us amid the process.
When we are onboard with forgiveness it is all upside.
PERSONAL BLESSEDNESS WITHIN FORGIVENESS
It is not just joy that is an inside job. What produces that joy? It is peace. Peace always comes when things are right. Make a study of peace in the Bible and you soon see that peace is linked with righteousness. Do what is right and peace comes.
To forgive is not only wise, but also right.
As the Gospel enshrined in forgiveness
sets right what was out of balance,
so we also get back into balance
when we adopt the Gospel heart of forgiveness.
This personal blessedness that is experienced within the process of forgiveness is its own reward. It is, of itself, a captivating wisdom. It is an incontrovertible wisdom, meaning it is destined for blessing.
Once we have tasted this and seen it in
full flight in our lives, we never turn back.
Once the eyes have been opened,
they cannot unsee the light.
Billions have asked,
“What is the meaning of life?”
This is the answer to that question,
and it is a Gospel reality.
THE HEART SEEKS RECONCILIATION
We all need peace. It is interwoven in the secret fissures of life. It is written on each of our hearts, but the further we get from it, the more justified it seems to thumb our nose at it. But to run the other way from peace delivers only torment.
Test this. Is it not true that our heart seeks healing, that it seeks peace, that it seeks reconciliation? It is good that our hearts seek shalom. Our hearts seek connection, healing, wholeness.
The way to this connection,
healing and wholeness is forgiveness.
Nothing else will deliver to us
what we are looking for and need.
Forgiveness is the healing
of God we all need.
To receive His forgiveness
and to engage in His forgiveness.
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