“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”
— Peter Ustinov
I almost didn’t write this piece. It felt too hard. Putting words on a page about this topic is like pressing hard on a bruise that is healing but still tender. A few days before the deadline, I finally opened my laptop and looked at the prompting questions (which I had ignored for the past month). I sighed. Took a deep breath.
Renewing forgiveness in my own life feels like putting down a weight that accumulates over and over again. I’m sure I’ve thoroughly forgiven and cleared out my heart. I feel light and stable, relieved. Time passes, something happens to revive the sting of it all, and suddenly I find I have to lay down all over again the heavy, aching stack of small hurts and large offenses, misunderstandings and trampled personal values.
It’s exhausting. Today, I felt like giving up. I definitely did not feel like writing about it. But as I perused the questions, I started to ponder. What in my heart blocks or counters forgiveness as an outlook or a practice? For me, it’s things like a slight, even unintentional, from someone to whom I have expressed forgiveness but who remains cold toward me. It’s the quick spike of frustration over how unfair it all feels. It’s the feeling of hopelessness after I’ve done my best to work through a complex, painful problem only to have it all fall apart, the issues and pain too deeply rooted for the relationship to ever be the same. These things make it much harder to extend forgiveness yet again for the distant greeting, the cold shoulder, the discarded invitation.
Why does Jesus place such great value on forgiveness? Why did he tell Peter to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven? That’s … 490 times. That’s a lot of forgiving. I looked up the passage in Matthew 18, and read the story Jesus tells after He answers Peter’s question (while Peter’s jaw is likely still hanging open). A king decides to square accounts with his servants, and one owes the king the equivalent of a house down payment. When he can’t pay it, the king orders the servant’s goods sold off and his whole family sold as indentured slaves to pay the debt. The servant throws himself at the king’s feet and begs for a chance to pay the money back. His plea touches the king’s heart, and out of compassion the king decides to erase the servant’s debt.
As the servant is leaving the throne room, he bumps into a fellow servant who owes him something like ten bucks. He seizes the fellow servant roughly by the throat and growls, “Pay up! Now!” The second servant begs for a chance to get the money together, but the first refuses to listen and has him thrown in jail until he can pay his debt.
The other servants looking on are outraged, and bring a report to the king, who summons the first servant and says, “You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy! And you can’t give mercy to your fellow servant who owes you a tiny fraction of what you owed me?” Furious, the king then carries out his original plan to put the screws to the man until he pays back his entire debt.
Jesus closes the story with, “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18.35, ESV). Ouch. Why does God want us to forgive and forgive and forgive, again and again? Because He knows that every time I choose to forgive a person for even a small action that revives a wealth of past pain, I will be reminded of how my heavenly Father has already forgiven me, completely and in advance, for repeating the same sins over and over. For snapping at my kids, being selfish, complaining instead of being grateful, resenting an interruption, hoarding my time and resources, and a hundred more things, every single day, that grieve his heart. Endless sinning requires endless forgiveness.
God wants me to continuously forgive from my heart for the sake of my heart. I can’t somehow punish the other person by withholding my forgiveness, and letting my own heart cool and congeal only hurts me.
Even though it feels like someone doesn’t deserve my forgiveness if they’re not willing to be warm towards me, that’s not my call to make. I can’t see their heart; only God can. My job is to leave them to God and focus on obeying Jesus’s challenging command to keep on forgiving, because He only ever asks me to do things that are good for my heart.
There are certain instances, informed by practical realism or wise self-protection, when God shows us that it’s appropriate to draw a boundary and to not expect or invite warmth to return. When we realize this is the case, a season of grieving often follows, and the command to extend ongoing forgiveness to prevent bitterness is mingled with an invitation to name the losses involved in giving up on that relationship as it was.
Especially when old anger or hurt resurfaces after forgiveness has already been offered, renewing forgiveness requires me to review what I’ve been forgiven for: that house down payment I owed. I have to be so aware of my own pile of debt that someone else’s offense against me looks like a measly ten bucks compared with what I know I should have paid. No problem. Of course I forgive you.
To offer fresh grace, I have to be freshly aware of grace. Jesus’s cross has to be vividly in front of my face. I have to spend time in God’s Word gazing at the beauty of the Perfect One, who endured a horrible death He did not deserve so His Father could forgive my sin—and the sins of the person who hurt me. The cross of Jesus has to be the lens through which I see the other human who is ignoring me across the parking lot. Then I can forgive the slight, even if it tugs behind it a whole mountain of hurt, because I’m acutely aware of being forgiven. Because what’s happening for that person today is invisible to me and I don’t know their whole story. Because giving the benefit of the doubt is what it means to keep renewing charity and love. Because it’s good for my own heart, and because Christ has already removed my sin—and theirs—as far as the east is from the west.
This is not an easy practice. I get tired. I want to quit. It seems easier and more satisfying to let resentment creep comfortingly back in, to keep score, compare, or return slight for slight. But then thorns and thistles would multiply in the garden of my heart, the gospel would calcify, and I would be a little less alive toward God, a little less charitable, a little less resilient, a little less healthy. I would stop letting this forgiveness process grow me towards Christ and start stagnating. If I’m honest, I don’t want any of that to happen.
So, as I drive home, instead of rehearsing my hurts, I choose to pray:
Lord, bless my former friend. Bless them with peace today. Bless their family, bless their work, bless their home. Bless their endeavors—all that they do. Bless their walk with you. Heal their heart, as You’re healing mine. Help me forgive them as many times as You forgive me, and help them to forgive me too. In Jesus’s Name, Amen.
The featured image, “What Remains,” is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
A writer, songwriter, and amateur music producer, Carolyn holds a Bachelor of Music from Wheaton College, where she pursued her twin passions for music and spiritual formation. Living overseas for the past twenty years has given her a keen interest in the connections between the inner life, the craft of making, and the art of sojourning, especially how tending her own soul affects her ability to tend the souls of others. Carolyn has contributed to an anthology of pandemic art, Beauty from Brokenness, and to Yet We Still Hope, a collection of honest, vulnerable essays by women serving overseas. You can connect with Carolyn and find her music and resources for the sojourning life at www.carolynbroughton.com.
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