April 15, 2008

• The Power of Forgiveness

                                            

  Lately I’ve been thinking about forgiveness.  I spent a lot of years in my early life not really understanding the concept.  I grew up in a pretty strict household, with high standards for behavior.  For the most part, I was what you might call a “good kid”.  Some people are born with a defiant streak a mile wide while others, like me, are apparently gentle and compliant.  Not that I was a perfect child, far from it!  There was the time I decided to play pyromaniac and set my mattress on fire, or the time I thought I could improve my little sister’s appearance by cutting her eyelashes off with a pair of my mother’s very sharp and very pointy sewing scissors (luckily I didn’t poke her eye out), or the time I blithely ignored the rule about not playing by the river and went out on the ice with my friends in the winter and fell through.  Come to think of it, maybe I wasn’t such a good kid after all….. 

  My greatest fear as a child was that I would somehow do something so bad and let my parents down so much that they would never forgive me.  I don’t know why I had such a deep fear of this.  My parents were great parents.  They were strict, but fair.  They showed equal measures of approval, love, and discipline.  They lived their love more than spoke of it.  My Dad was more demonstrative than my Mom.  She is a stoic scandinavian, and she herself was raised by very strict, stoic and emotionally reserved parents.  I have inherited some of that scandinavian restraint.  Combine that with being introverted, and sometimes I come across as aloof.  My family often tells me about what a “sober” or “serious” little girl I was. (I’m the shy looking little girl sitting next to Daddy in the picture above.)  Mom says as a child, even as an infant, I preferred to watch, observe, and passively absorb my surroundings, rather than immerse myself in them.  I didn’t like being cuddled, at least according to her.  I still don’t like to cuddle, according to my husband.  I love a good, warm hug, but give me my space when I am reading, watching TV, sleeping, or otherwise engaged in an activity that might present the opportunity for cuddling.               However, I digress.

  Deeply ingrained in my childhood mind was the concept that “the wages of sin is death”.  For some reason, the second part of that verse “but the gift of God is eternal life” didn’t sink in quite as firmly.  Now, I knew that if I did something wrong at home, I wasn’t going to be struck down dead, but somehow in my mind that eternal punishment promised to sinners translated to me as “don’t  screw up or you’ll pay big-time – and if you DO screw up, don’t let Mom and Dad find out!”  Consequently I became very good at hiding things –  actions, activities, even emotions.  Being so secretive almost came — and I hate to admit this –  naturally to me.  In keeping my secrets, I didn’t have to face letting anyone down, especially my parents.  No – especially myself.  But I couldn’t’t escape the fact that even if I could keep my secrets from everyone else, God knew.  Even so, I kept hiding things, kept ignoring my conscience, and the guilt began to build.

  Guilt is an insidious demon.  Guilt is what happens when you hide from the truth.  Guilt can build a wall around you so strong that you think you can never break through, so why even try?  Just keep living the lie.  Just keep up appearances.  Don’t risk letting the truth come out, because what if the people you love won’t forgive you? What if they stop loving you? Guilt has a treacherous partner whose name is fear.  Live with the two of them for companions long enough and you begin to understand what Thoreau meant when he said “most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”  My song was stifled.  And then a miracle happened.  I learned about forgiveness.  It wasn’t that I hadn’t known about it before, but I had never understood it, or maybe I just didn’t trust that it really existed. 

  I won’t go into details about this miracle, but I will say this.  The lie I was living with at the time was too big to contain.  I had to make a choice.  Make up an even bigger lie and stay trapped in guilt and fear for the rest of my life, or admit the truth and lose everything I held most dear.  I chose the truth, and the amazing thing was, I didn’t lose anything but a little unholy pride.  The person I was lying to chose to forgive me – truly and unconditionally forgive me.  That forgiveness broke through my walls of guilt and fear, shattered them as if they were nothing more than a pile of twigs.  It was then I finally and deeply understood the meaning of forgiveness.  God made Himself known to me in the form of a flesh and blood human being who chose to love and forgive rather than to hate and condemn.  This experience with forgiveness was so powerful that at first it was painful, but as I learned to trust and accept that it was real, I even learned to forgive myself.  From that moment on I have been free to sing my song.

  Recently a college professor from an obscure (to me, anyway) college in Pennsylvania has been causing a sensation with what is called “The Last Lecture”.  His name is Randy Pausch, and if you have not heard of him, you almost certainly will.  In September, 2007, he participated in a lecture series his college calls “The Final Lecture”.  In it, the professors are charged with an exercise to give a lecture in which they share their most profound life lessons.  The catch is, Randy Pausch is dying, and this was more than an exercise for him; it is his real life.  In a recent interview with Diane Sawyer he said if he only had three words to leave, they would be “Tell the truth”.  Then he added, if he could have three more, they would be “All the time.”  While I wholeheartedly agree with him that it is essential to live in the truth, I would also have to add my 3 cents worth and say “Learn to forgive”.  When you are forgiven, and practice forgiveness, you can learn to live with the truth, even when the truth is painful.   When you are forgiven, and practice forgiveness, you can truly give and receive love.

  This is my song — Truth…..Forgiveness….Love. 

  Praise God!   

   

  • 2:04 pm
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