Thoughts On: The Taste of Forgiveness

Sixteen years ago our nation experienced the kind of pain that you wish you only had to read about in old, outdated history books — the kind of heartbreak that everyone knows will be seared into our skin and seep into our bones, that won’t wash away in a year, or two, or even ten. I remember lying on the couch, at home sick in my second week of third grade, listening as my mom picked up the phone, as she turned on the tv, as the horror sank into my own living room. I asked her to turn it off— we all knew. We all knew on that early September morning that something had twisted; something had broken. 

Last year I had the privilege of visiting the West Bank in Palestine, and I saw the beauty of the middle east with my own eyes. I witnessed the hospitality and the heartbreak, and I cried on the way back to Ohio, because something happened in that place, in my own heart, that I think will permanently knit me to the Palestinian people forever. For the first time, I saw on a grand scale what bitterness and hatred can do. I heard stories of people who had been labeled terrorists their entire lives because of only their heritage. I stood in front of a wall created to separate entire groups of people, and I wept as the weight of standing in the town of my Savior’s birth collided with the realization of what a seed of bitterness can breed. 

This all would have been fine — simply an educational experience — if it hadn’t broken open the bitterness in my own heart. For years I lived in fight or flight, waiting for the next bad thing. I never even blinked as I built my own walls of anger and fear and isolation. I think in some ways I knew it was there, but mostly I think it was God who gently nudged me toward demolition. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what, and I will be forever grateful for the Lord’s patience and gentleness and timeliness. It was God who showed me that eating the ash of anger would not satisfy, and it was God who handed me the warm milk and honey of forgiveness and joy. He always knows when and where we will best understand our own blind-spots. 

I think today is a beautiful day to remember that we have a choice. We can choose to be hard — to generalize and point fingers and forget hope — or we can choose to bow down. We can choose to let the things that wreck us be the things that soften us. We can choose to see our own part, to see where we contribute to the very thing we are angry about, and we can choose to take responsibility for our own hearts and our own responses and our own walls. Today we get to remember that sometimes things go up in smoke, but we also get to remember that forgiveness is what will bring us through the night. In the end, bitterness is not the same as justice. And in the end, God is forever and always just, and he is currently and will continue on sorting things out. When it comes to it, good will triumph and sin will have no power. Until then, I’d rather spend my life tearing down the walls instead of building them back up.