Devotionals
But God commendeth his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:7
When I was 16-years-old, my mother found a lump the size of a quarter in her breast. After going to the doctor and having tests performed, it was determined that the lump was a reaction to one of the medications that she was taking for something else. Months passed and she was taken off all the medications, yet the lump remained and grew. Nine months after the original diagnosis, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Suddenly, time was extremely important and treatments needed to be started immediately. Explaining that her tumor was the size of a watermelon, the doctor went through our options. Without blinking, he told my parents that chemotherapy would either work or she would die very soon. Through tears, my mother asked how this happened, and he coldly replied, “The pathologist had a bad day.”
As my Mom underwent treatments with a different doctor, we discovered just how much her misdiagnosis had cost us. Nine months earlier, my mother had breast cancer, which is 97% curable, with a tumor the size of a quarter. By the time it was correctly diagnosed, the tumor had grown to the size of a watermelon and had become inflammatory breast cancer (IBC). IBC is very aggressive and usually fatal. Victims have less than a 40% chance of living 5 years and are never pronounced “cancer free.”
From day one of her treatments, my mother suffered. Chemotherapy made her deathly ill; she developed lymphodema. As a complication of the lymphodema, she was hospitalized more than 15 times with cellulitis. The size and location of the tumor caused problems inserting a port. She developed a blood clot. Everything led to some other disaster.
My mother desperately battled cancer for a record-breaking 7 years before she passed on to Jesus. You can imagine the pain and frustration we felt for the doctor who misdiagnosed my mother, causing her eventual death. Careless and unconcerned, he had not thoroughly reviewed the test results. Nonchalant and cold, he had given us the most painful news without an apology or any show of emotion. It was very easy to hate him.
Yet God would not allow me this hate. Hating the doctor did not make him sorry or make him care that my mother was gone; it simply left me broken, bitter and empty. I started silently telling the doctor, I forgive you. Just because I have forgiven the man does not mean that I must trust him again. I would not recommend any other person to become his patient, but I don’t hate him and I have let go of the hurt he caused my family.
Letting go is not enough. I had to learn that the doctor is a child of God. Just as Christ died to save me while I was still a sinner, he died to save the uncaring doctor who had torn my family apart. Whether or not I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior is irrelevant; He still died to save this sinner. Even if the doctor remained unrepentant, it would not matter; Christ still died to save him. His sins are no worse than my own and yet I was redeemed. As a child of God, I had a higher calling than to simply forgive this man; I was called to pray for his well being and his eternal salvation.
God was not through with me yet. I had always wanted to write the doctor a letter telling him about the pain he caused my mother and my family, but I gave this dream up and instead sent the doctor a quick note to tell him that I forgave him, to tell him about my God who had made forgiveness possible and to ask forgiveness for the hate I had harbored against him. I finished by telling him that I would be praying for him. Of course, I was then obligated to start praying for him.
I don’t know if the letter ever meant anything to him, but it did two things for me, it pushed me past forgiveness and into action and it freed me of the burden I was carrying. Even though I had forgiven him, the burden remained because I had not made restitution for my own hate. It is not enough that we forgive those who have wronged us; we must forgive and see them as equal children of God and worthy of our prayers. We must put aside hate and embrace them in love. If we do not, we build a wall between ourselves and God. This wall keeps us from truly being free with God. With this said, I encourage readers to forgive and pray for your enemies because only then are we free to move on and pursue the life of relationship that our God intended for us all along.
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Thank you for this heart touching piece. If we hate someone, it only hurts us. Very well done.
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