Healing

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Betty Ferguson is no celebrity, nor has she won the Noble Peace Prize, nor received any special recognition from any foundation, nor won any awards. She is what our unofficial societal cache system would call a nobody. However, Betty Ferguson managed to pull off one of the most unbelievable feats I think I've ever heard of. In 1975 her daughter Debbie was murdered by her English teacher Ray Payne. Payne had kidnapped Debbie and raped her before strangling her and is now serving a life sentence for the crime. For six years Betty was wrought with grief and hatred--channeling her all of her energy into ferocious rage against Payne. "I hated him more than I hated anyone in my life", said Betty. Her family life begin to suffer and her remaining children felt the effects of their mother's abandonment. She turned to alcohol and slipped deeper into depression and began suffering physically with various ailments. "I was consumed by hatred" recalled Betty. In 1981, while attending her sister's funeral, she recalls that a line from the reading of the Lord's prayer seem to touch her --"Forgive those who trespass against us". She began thinking about the concept of forgiveness and started reading books about the subject. Then five years later, Betty went to prison to see Ray Payne. For the first time she stared into the eyes of her daughter's killer--the man she no doubt had many fantasies about killing herself-- and she began talking to him. As the tears poured down her face, she told Payne how her daughter's death had shattered her, how much Debbie truly meant to her, and how for so many years she hated him beyond expression for it. This alone brought Payne himself to tears, and then Betty, against the scorn and disapproval of her entire family and many of Debbie's now adult friends, told Payne that she forgave him for raping and killing her little girl--a show of grace and forgiveness rarely equaled in human history.

Undoubtedly, among the more difficult traits to acquire as a human being is the willingness to pardon those who have wronged you, including sometimes the people you love. Hurt is not an easy thing to accept from people. When someone hurts you, the instantaneous first reaction always is to want to retaliate against them and this is the same for even the gentlest of people. Even the pacifist harbors fantasies of revenge and struggles to control them. In our minds, when we've been hurt by someone, hurting them back seems to us to be the best solution which we believe will then bring us peace of mind. We derive a sense of satisfaction knowing we've returned the favour, and can, we think, rest easy now. For us it is honorable to repay hurt with hurt because we all have these self-important reputations to uphold, and we cannot let a wrong done to us go without retaliation.

At other times however, we don't retaliate but instead we take a vow of silence with those who wrong us and this usually happens more in disputes between friends and family. Once close friends and once close relatives become silent enemies for sometimes years on end, refusing to make a move in order to mend the fences. Bad feelings and grudges are held and harbored for years even long after the pain of the dispute subsides and those holding the grudges often forget at times what they're even angry about.

Then there the instances where the one who was wronged the other makes attempts at reconciliation and tries a series of apologies to bridge the peace and restore the friendships or relationships, and still, the other person refuses to let it go. Often this causes the person attempting reconciliation to become angry themselves and regret that they ever tried to patch things up. By not accepting the apologies and the efforts by those who have hurt them, this gives people a sense that they have evened the score-- that by holding the grudge they will indeed finally return that hurt which caused them pain. In the great majority of cases, the wrongs people suffer from others are not significant enough to warrant harboring the ill feelings they do. A lot of the time they are not exactly the end of civilization as we know it, and have little consequence to their daily lives and affairs. More often then not, Mount Everest is made out of a mole hill and people exaggerate ridiculously about them, and they certainly have little to compare to in terms of pain with Betty Ferguson.

Why do people hold grudges and refuse to forgive? Why is it so difficult for us to practice grace? It all comes from one ultimate source: pride. It is no more simpler then that. The opposite of pride is humility and in order to forgive someone a person must be humble. The reason why people hold grudges is because they think forgiving the wrongs done to them is beneath their character--they feel a very strange sense of honor in this. They're simply too proud to forgive because they perceive forgiveness as a sign of weakness. There is no other reason then stubborn foolish pride for the inability to forgive and forget, and it has nothing to do usually with any real damage done by these wrongs, and usually the hurt done to them means very little long after they continue to hold these grudges.

Those who can't or won't forgive or hold lengthy grudges usually miss something very crucial: they hurt no one but themselves doing it. Besides the pain of being wronged, they heap additional stress and agony upon themselves by allowing their thoughts to obsess with these grudges which ultimately does no harm to the person they're mad at. The people they're upset with end up renting space in their head, and so they not only carry the hurt of being wronged, they also carry the hurt from thinking about that wrong constantly. In their perceived stance of integrity and honor, they end becoming miserable and this takes a serious toll on the mind and body.

Why should we forgive? Why should we extend grace to our enemies and mercy to people who step on us? There are three reasons, and we have to go to the one who epitomizes forgiveness in so many ways to find it:

14 "For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Matthew 6:15

These words were spoken by Jesus Christ and He gives the first reason: because we are guilty of hurting and wronging others, and God who is willing to forgive us expects us to return the same courtesy to others. We forget when we hold grudges and vendettas against others that we too make mistakes and terrible judgements which result in wronging other people. We mysteriously acquire amnesia thinking that the wrongs done to us is something we'd surely never do to anyone else--but we do and we do it a lot. Ironically, we also get upset when someone else won't pardon or forgive us, yet we seem to have little problem not forgiving others. Our silly pride tells us that when we're wronged, that we shouldn't forgive so as to maintain honor, yet when we wrong we expect forgiveness because our pride again tells us that whatever we've done to the other person can't be that terrible, because of course we think ourselves to be too upstanding to do anything that bad. We blow minor wrongs done to us out of proportion, but we trivialize the wrongs we do to others. That's the essence of human nature in this matter.

The concept of forgiveness is found only in God. The secular world has no foundation for practicing forgiveness because in their world it is survival of the fittest--every man for himself where pride is heralded as a virtue and humility as a handicap. Humility is not a staple of our non-religious culture--it is a fixture of God. To forgive someone is to humble yourself and remember that you too make mistakes; saying and doing things to others that are hurtful and destructive. The bible teaches that this is why a person ought to forgive others. The scriptures are also quite bold about how often you ought to forgive people for their trespasses:

21 Then Peter came to Him and said, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?" 22 Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. Matthew 18:21-22

Seventy times seven. Note however that this is not to taken as a literal number and Jesus does not mean that we should keep a tally and stop at 491. It is a symbolic gesture that represents endless forgiveness. It suggests that we make it a habit to forgive people who wrong us. Jesus makes a fantastic statement about the second reason we should forgive in Matthew 5:

"But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you,do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you". Matthew 5:44

When a person is willing to forgive even their enemies, it releases the terrible burden of anger, hate, and revenge which cause severe mental distress. It also prevents the escalation of further harm through retaliation. Retaliation is an idea Jesus spoke much against and the reason is because it destroys peace and initiates further conflict. Jesus said in Matthew 5:9, "blessed are the peacemakers.......". Have you ever noticed that trying to incite or fight a person that won't respond or fight back is near impossible? Anger delivered needs anger received to in order to survive. A fire started will eventually burn out, but if you fan it, it persists to burn. A person trying argue with a non-responsive person ends up giving up because their anger dies out without fuel--"a soft answer turns away wrath" says the book of Proverbs.

Similarly, forgiving a wrong extinguishes the fire. It makes peace and allows everyone to get on with their lives. A person never knows or believes how good it feels to forgive someone until they actually take that step. The aura of peace surrounds a person who finally takes that leap in forgiving, and the world is always a much better place when even one person forgives another. Love is much easier to practice then hate, and once we discard all that pride we are infested with and get humble, we can do it; we can love, we can forgive.

The third and most important reason to forgive is found in man's predicament before God. Men and women are sinners and we all do bad things. We do things contrary to God's law and God's desires. We sin before God and if we sin before God that means we're going to require forgiveness from God ourselves:

25 "And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. 26 But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses." Mark 11:25-26

This is the primary reason we should bite the bullet and show others mercy for wrongs; because God offers to do it for us. The greatest showing of forgiveness is found in the life and purpose of Jesus Christ. Man in his natural state stands condemned before God for sins, and God was so willing to extend us mercy, that He sacrificed His own son so that we may have it. Jesus took the punishments for us on the cross for our wrongs against God. God was perfectly just in giving to us what we deserved, but instead He permitted a man who had done no wrong to anyone, to die for ours. What parent on the planet would give their own child's life as a show of mercy for others? No one, that is only found in the divine.

This is what grieves God the most about our reluctance to forgive--that He is perfectly willing out of His immense love to forgive us for the filthy and abhorrent things we've done by giving his son for our salvation, yet we stubbornly refuse to even accept that, and then will not forgive other people on top of it. Out of his tremendous grace, God permitted His only begotten son, a completely innocent man to be whipped with canes, scourged to a bloody mess with metal hooks; spit on; have thorns twisted into his skull; be dragged across jagged rocks; be nailed by hands and feet to a tree; and eventually die from suffocation, blood loss, and pain so that we could be forgiven the sins we commit, yet we can't even forgive someone because of a dispute over a will, or because of a senseless and meaningless argument we've had.

We need to do an inventory of our own hearts and come to realize that the sins we've committed against God are exceedingly worse than the sins others commit against us. If we need an example of a human being forgiving others out of sheer mercy and grace besides Betty Ferguson, we need only look to Jesus himself. After all the whippings, scourging, humiliation, and torture inflicted upon Him by the Roman soldiers and the bloodthirsty crowd, He says this to God:

"Father forgive them, for they know not what they do". -- Luke 23:34

Jesus endured all of that as an innocent man, yet was willing to forgive the guilty people who caused Him so much trauma. Jesus is willing to forgive the sins of the entire world in their many forms and many degrees of evil, trillions of them, sins beyond number--that's how forgiving he is. As it stands right now, whatever you've done, whatever sins you're guilty of, Jesus Christ is willing to forgive them. Our multiplied sins; sins no one else would ever consider forgiving us, are sins Jesus is willing to forgive. There isn't anything in your past that the heart of Jesus won't forgive--He has grace for you that you cannot fathom. Jesus loves you that much, and if there's someone out there who won't forgive you for what you've done to them, remember that Christ will because He is forgiveness personified, He is God, He is love, and He is the most compassionate being that exists. If there's someone out there that still has a grudge against you--forgive them because they know not what they do, and that will warm the heart of Jesus. Concerning our own need for God's forgiveness, we can all have salvation and be delivered from the judgement of God and the inevitable reality of hell by simply calling upon Jesus Christ to forgive our sins and be to us, Lord and savior. We don't need to beg Him for that forgiveness, nor does He expect we apologize a thousand times for the sins we committed against him--He offers it out of His own merciful character in that great love He has for all of us.

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