On Forgiveness
The beginning of a journey.
For most of this past year, I’ve wrestled with intense anger towards a certain person in my past. This past weekend, I felt that anger wash away in a flood of forgiveness and goodwill, and I actually found myself earnestly praying for this man’s welfare. Moreover, this new state of mind seems to be durable: this entire week, I haven’t found myself wishing anything other than this man’s health and well-being.
Of course, forgiveness is an ongoing journey, and I won’t pretend to have mastered it. This feels more as though I’ve turned a much-needed corner on the path. Nonetheless, the experience of what finally worked to help me turn that corner me was cool enough that I wanted to try and put it down on the page.
A quick note: as always when I’m talking about someone from my life, I’ll take pains to provide as few identifying details as possible. I loathed cancel culture when it was ascendent in our culture, and one reason is the Christian idea of grace: I simply don’t like the idea of someone being judged forever by their worst sins. In the same way, while this person hurt me and others I care about pretty badly, I would hate for that to be how they’re known forever.
That said, I also believe that a good story needs to be specific rather than vague. What details I do include, I did so because I didn’t see a way to make the story as useful without them.
The Problem
So, why did I have such a hard time forgiving this man (let’s call him James)? I can think of at least two reasons.
First, he hurt me pretty badly. I used to go to him for marriage advice, and the advice he gave me made my new marriage concretely worse. There are things that he recommended that I do that were stupid and which hurt both me and my wife. He also had a habit of cutting me down and poking at deeply vulnerable spots in my psyche which could leave me sobbing, feeling broken, and (often) in so much pain that I no longer wished to live. This happened more than a few times.
To put it another way: this isn’t the kind of pain I felt like I could just wash away or sweep under the rug.
The second reason is logistical. This man is pretty firmly in my past. We haven’t really talked in a year. When I reached out to him, he expressed complete disinterest in hearing why I felt so hurt by him. I’ve also talked to other friends of mine whom he badly hurt, and towards whom he hasn’t expressed any contrition.
Which is to say: the kind of forgiveness that comes after reconciliation doesn’t feel remotely on the table. If I was going to forgive this man, I was going to have to do so without any help from him.
What Worked Part 1: Being Made Whole
I saw a video from a theologian friend of mine who talked about forgiveness this way:
1) We feel angry at so-and-so because we feel as though they have stolen something essential from us, something which we need in order to feel whole.
2) When we feel whole again, forgiveness flows naturally.
This left me with the question: what essential piece of myself do I feel like James took?
The answer didn’t come down to bad marriage advice. My wife and I are thankfully doing very well right now. Plus, I take seriously the idea of Heaven and of eternity, which means I don’t really get bent out of shape over a couple of bad years.
It also didn’t come down to suicidal ideation. I wasn’t thrilled with how James talked to me, but my suicidal ideation also vanished as soon as I ended our relationship. It’s now something bad that happened to me, which is different from something essential that I still feel as though I am missing.
Nor did it come down to the fact that James treated some of my friends terribly. I am prone to what I hope is righteous anger on behalf of people I love who are hurt by so-and-so, but I’m not trying to fool myself: whatever righteous anger I may have felt towards James was eclipsed by bitterness. For much of this past year, James lived rent-free in my head, which I don’t think is a characteristic of righteous anger.
No. What I felt had been stolen from me went deeper.
What bothered me the most about my relationship with James was a level of (intentional or unintentional) emotional manipulation that I’ve rarely experienced before or since. Each time that he said something that made me hate myself and want to die, I found myself apologizing to him for being too much of a snowflake. Almost every time that we would have disagreements, he would respond by accusing me of some combination of: misremembering what he had said, misinterpreting what he had said, or simply being defensive. During a typical disagreement, he texted me: “You can believe what I tell you, or you can believe the story you make up about me in your head.”
I think this style of communication would probably bother most people, but it cut me especially deep. The reason is that part of the abuse that I dealt with as a child made it so that I have immense trouble trusting my own perception of the world. I’ve slowly pieced together a certain amount of faith in my ability to accurately see and remember what has happened in my life. James’ emotional manipulation (again: intentional or not) shook that faith to its foundation.
Or to put it another way: what I felt like James took from me, and which I didn’t feel whole without, was my willingness to trust my own perception of the world.
So what changed, such that my trust in my own perception was restored? A few things.
First, I shared some of the stories of my more unpleasant interactions with James with other people, and without exception they were horrified. I’m not going to tell those stories publicly for pretty obvious reasons. But it was validating to see that my reactions weren’t off-base: the kinds of things that horrified me also horrified my friends and people whom I trusted.
Second, as I’ve developed closer relationships with other Christians in my life, I’ve started to get a sense for what relationship in the Kingdom looks like. The small group that my wife and I joined has been a huge example of this. As our small group laughed together and encouraged each other and went deep together, I started to see a sharp contrast between Kingdom relationships and the relationship I had with James. On some level, I was terrified that my relationship with James would just replay itself over and over again with other people in my life, because I was the problem, and so seeing a marked contrast between that relationship and other, more healthy relationships helped me to ground myself.
Or to put it another way: I experienced darkness, but then I experienced light, and by experiencing light, I felt more confident in my assessment that the darkness was bad.
Third: I was struggling with a part of my life that’s pretty important to me recently. James used to give me lots of advice on this area, and even though I knew intellectually that his advice was bad, there was an insecure part of me that thought: “I’m clearly screwing up this part of my life, maybe James’ advice to me was good. Maybe I’ll never be successful without him in my life.”
Because my anger was tied to my own insecurity, the more insecure I felt, the more angry I became at James. But when I was able to address this area of my life through applying God’s wisdom and Christian principles, I felt my insecurity vanish and my anger abate.
What Worked Part 2: Love and Sadness
Notice that I said that my anger “abated”, not that it “vanished”. Feeling more whole, on its own, actually wasn’t enough to heal my bitterness.
The next step happened when I was in church this past weekend. I had a powerful sense of God’s presence, and it occurred to me: in all the time that I knew James, he very rarely seemed close to Jesus. That struck me, suddenly, as so deeply and unutterably sad*. And so I asked God if He would make Himself known to James.
This was one of the big hurdles that I faced when it came to forgiveness: I simply didn’t know what it might look like to earnestly pray for God to bless James. For example, I know that James would like for his advice to reach more people, but I couldn’t pray for that in good conscience because I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of giving James a bigger platform to potentially hurt more people.
But praying for James to know Jesus? That I could do.
1) Of all of the gifts that I’ve ever experienced, a personal relationship with God has been by far the best. Praying for someone else to receive this gift feels profoundly prosocial.
2) I believe that a personal encounter with Jesus is one of those things that cannot fail to make us into better human beings. Our relationship with Him transforms us, and the people I know who do the most good in the world all say that it’s due to their relationship with God: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NIV). Praying for someone to know Christ is sort of like praying for them to become a better person, and I don’t know a single person on God’s green earth about whom I am not comfortable praying that prayer.
As I prayed for James to know Jesus, it became an opportunity for me to bless him in a way that I am almost certain will make him less likely to hurt other people in the way that he hurt me. I was able to see his wounding me as a natural outgrowth of his own hurt, which made me both love him and feel very sad for him. Love and sadness are both powerful antidotes to bitterness, and as they filled me, I found that I just didn’t have room or interest in my heart to be angry at James anymore.
What Worked Part 3: Prayer
The third thing that worked to help me to forgive James and to let go of my bitterness towards him was prayer. I confessed my rage at James to my small group, and one of the other men prayed that God would help me to find freedom.
I think this prayer actually made all the difference.
I’m training to become a prison chaplain, and one theme that’s been hammered in my class so far is the idea that God is the one who transforms us. We cannot transform ourselves; instead our transformation is a gift from the only One who can actually change our hearts. As Paul puts it in Ephesians: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” (Eph. 2:8a, NIV).
I don’t fully know how this relates to the rest of the essay. I don’t fully understand the division of labor between myself and God when it comes to forgiveness, just like I don’t fully understand it in other areas of my life. But it felt like an important lens to view this whole thing through.
Forgiveness is hard. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, NIV) is one of the hardest verses in the Bible for me to live out. If you’re struggling too, it might be time to take a more clinical approach: what do you feel like the other person took from you that makes you no longer feel whole, and how can that thing be restored?
*To be clear, I certainly don’t mean to imply that James’ poor behavior was a consequence of his not being Christian. I think many of my non-Christian friends are closer to God than they (or, perhaps, than some Christians) think they are. But that said, there are people of every faith and non-faith tradition who are genuinely far from God’s infinite love and goodness. I think those people inflict a great deal of pain on others. In my experience, they also live in a great deal of pain themselves. James was one such individual.
Heal the West is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or becoming a founding member. I greatly appreciate your support.