In my own life, it’s happened quite a few times. Someone, in some way, has hurt me. I don’t think it’s possible for someone to go all through life without ever once hurting somebody. I can’t even say for sure that I’ve never hurt anybody, but I know I have the capability there. It’s a part of human nature, and not something we should be proud to have in our nature.
What should set us apart is how we respond to the breach of trust. We could, if we so desire, clam up. Make sure we don’t let anyone else in ever again, and we won’t get hurt, right? The only problem lies in that if we don’t let anyone in, then we’ll wind up leading a solitary existance. And if you go through life alone, chances are you’ll go nuts.
We COULD just forgive, but dwell on the past. We forgive the person who hurt us, but then when it behooves us, bust out the “look what you did to me back then!” on them. You’ll keep your friends temporarily, at least, but eventually, your dwelling on the past will get old, and you may have to find a new friend. This, as with clamming up, could lead to a lonely, lonely existance.
Or, perhaps we might consider doing what Jesus said in Luke 17:3-4.
Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.
Now, this doctrine doesn’t make a lot of sense to a lot of people. I mean, forgive your brother for breaking your trust, if he does it 7 times a day, you have to forgive him 7 times a day? Where’s the sense in that? If he broke your trust 7 times, by time number 7 you’re practically expecting it, why keep forgiving him?
I think something a lot of people miss in that verse is the process of forgiveness. We don’t turn around the very second that they betray us and say “All is forgiven”. We’re supposed to rebuke them first, then, if they repent, you forgive them. You have to smack them upside the head and say “look, you’re acting stupid, shape up” before you can forgive them for acting stupid. This is something I don’t think I really realized when I was younger.
Take, for instance, the girl who tried telling me she’d broken up with her boyfriend to get me to date her. Thankfully, I was enough of a gentleman to think that if she had just broken up with him I didn’t want to rush things, because as I later found out, they’d never broken up, and she wound up getting sick of waiting for me so she found another guy to use as a tool of her revenge. As it turned out, the boyfriend was cheating on her, so she decided cheating on him was the best way to get back at him. Now, that stung like nothing else, finding out that I’d almost gotten played for a fool, that someone would’ve tried using my feelings for them to their own personal advantage, but I never confronted her about it. She went on to do many stupid things after that, and I wonder if I’d rebuked her for it, would things have wound up any different?
The strange thing is, even though I never confronted her to see if she was sorry for what she almost did, I still forgave her. She was still a good friend, despite her lying to me in an attempt to manipulate me, and I wasn’t ging to throw away the friendship over something that, ultimately, was petty (it was high school, after all). I still cared about her as a friend. Just because she’d betrayed my trust didn’t mean I’d stopped caring about her, it killed me to watch some of the crap she went through and mistakes she made. When her boyfriend was staying with my roommate and I and got borderline abusive, I told him to stop. He responded with the words “Make me”, at which something in me just snapped, and before you know it I was half a step away from beating the living daylights out of a guy twice my size (to my surprise, the combination enraged look, snarling “You want me to make you?” and the 34 ounce louisville slugger I had apparently caught him off guard. He was well behaved the rest of the night). And this for someone who’d betrayed my trust one time in the past.
I believe it was John Maxwell who compared trust to having change in your pocket. Every time you earn someone’s trust, you add change to your pockets. Every time you lose their trust, you pay out a little change. If you’re constantly losing people’s trust, eventually you’re going to come up empty and you won’t have anyone who trusts you. I don’t think that we should completely write someone off as being untrustworthy because they made one mistake, the fact is, we’re human. We’ll make mistakes eventually because we aren’t perfect. But if we’re going to make mistakes, we need to be up front about it. With Adam and Eve, they tried covering their mistakes insteadof repenting of them, and look where that got them!
I guess this is a twofold thought for both the people who make mistakes, and the people who’re bound to forgive them for it. If you’re going to make mistakes, don’t try to hide them from those you care about, even if you’re afraid of hurting them. And if you’re the forgiver, and someone comes to you and apologizes for a mistake they made, forgive them. And I really mean, forgive them. Don’t lock it away for blackmail material later, don’t dwell on that one time so and so did something to you, just forgive them and move on with life. Grudges will only make things worse.
Tags: Personal, Religious, Writing by Andrew Laine
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