Forgiveness? You’ve Got to be Kidding!

Keith, how can I quit resenting people who have ridiculed me or lied to me, etc.? I can’t seem to shake off resentments—even when I pray and want to let them go.

When I first read the question I thought, you’re asking the wrong guy. But then I realized that I haven’t harbored a resentment for a long time, and when I thought back I had to laugh at myself at how long it took me to do the things necessary to me to give resenting up.

I have Charlie by the scruff of his shirt with my left hand, and was about to knock him out of the front door backwards! I can still feel the resentment seething up from my chest into my face and arms, giving me an unreal strength.

Just then I hear my wife’s voice. She is shaking my shoulder gently from the other side of the bed. “Keith, wake up; you’re having a bad dream.”

The fantasy of my beating up Charlie, my associate who shamed me at the office, collapses like a pop-up scene in a child’s King Arthur book as I wake up and roll over.

In that half sleeping-half awake state, I realized that resentments have plagued my life since I was a child. Usually they are fueled by my perception that someone has slighted me, gossiped about me, not included me in an “invitation” of some sort, been disloyal, or cheated me. But whatever the “crime,” obsessions about resentments have caused many painful and helpless hours. I flutter back into the pillow and close my eyes.

*

I see a heavy walnut door swinging open in the basement video theater of my mind. A title rolls across the screen as I sit down: ACT ONE: “JUSTICE” The action is just beginning. We are in a great courtroom, with a heavy walnut judge’s bench. A huge white-haired figure in a long white robe is sitting behind the bench, looking remarkably like God. He is handing down justice from this “highest court in the land.” My associate, Charlie, the one who humiliated me, is standing before the bench. The scene begins with the crashing of a thousand-pound gavel and a roaring voice—deep and powerful enough to be heard across the Rose Bowl—“GUILTY.” I smile and nod my head.

Now a familiar dramatic scenario begins to unfold as the title “ACT II: REVENGE. THE COST THEY’LL PAY!” is rolling across the screen. And then, there I am, the prosecutor, the hero, delivering creative, brilliant, scathing, and cutting accusations about the heinous nature of the guilty party’s crime, and calling for the most horrible sentence possible, as I subtly orchestrate the offender’s fate—actually wanting to clobber him physically as “the enemy”! (He mumbles that he’s sorry, but I know he doesn’t mean it.”)

I’m angry and I go to the Bible to see what Jesus said about forgiving. (That was not a good experience.) Jesus said that what God decides to do about forgiving us is connected directly with our forgiving other people. “You can’t get forgiveness, for instance, without forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God’s part.” (Mt. 6:14, 15, The Message)

My mentor explains to me that it isn’t that God’s being hard-nosed and legalistic; it’s just that when I’m filled with resentment and unforgiveness I am automatically disqualifying myself to receive forgiveness.

I know that Act III is supposed to be “FORGIVENESS,” but I also know that I usually just rewind Acts I and II and play them over and over, day after day, escalating the revenge and punishment scenarios when I’m really into a big-time resentment. But this time I hear the wise deep voice of the Judge telling me: “Mr. prosecutor, when you keep resenting people, you are letting them life rent free in your head and it shuts the doorway to you-know-Who.”

I cry out, “But how can I quit? I’ve tried and tried, but there seems to be no ‘power off’ button when I am into a resentment scenario!”

The Judge replies as patiently as he can, “Forgive him! That’s the healing remedy I’ve given you to stop the pain of resentment.”

Forgive my associate?! I try—and sure enough, I feel better—for about five minutes, and then I am back obsessing about the wrong he’d done to me.

“See,” I whine to the Judge, “forgiveness just doesn’t work for me!”

“Forgive him again! and get back to work at what is before you today, (without congratulating yourself for forgiving him.) Think about the time you first came to me for forgiveness and mercy and I forgave you. Do this as many times as it takes, and one day the resentment just won’t come back. Then you can move to the final scene, ACT III, and the freedom I’ve provided for those under my jurisdiction through the miracle of forgiveness-which is the only way to get free when someone hurts you.”

I cry, “It’s not fair!” But the giant gavel crashes on the Judge’s bench again.

“Next case,” the deep echoing voice says, and a shrill bell rings. And I know what I have to do.

I Jump awake with a start as my wife is leaning over me to answer the first call of the morning on the bedside phone. “It’s for you,” she says sleepily. “It’s Charlie, from the office.”

“Forgive him. Even if it’s personal against you and repeated several times through the day and he says ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again,’ forgive him.” (Luke 17:3,4 THE MESSAGE)

Lord, thank you that you have stayed with me until I finally see that my own sin and judging and condemning Charlie is more crippling to me than anything Charlie has done. Thank you for forgiving me and giving me another chance. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Attitude Check

Keith, when I decided to become a parish priest I had no idea that some people consider ministers as “hired hands” and not colleagues, brothers or sisters on the adventure of living for Christ. My response to being treated as a lackey by some prominent church people is to want to bust them in the mouth. Did I get it wrong about the role and status of an ordained minister? D.M.

I don’t know what you should do, D.M., but I can certainly identify with the “bust them in the mouth” urge. I am a layman, and am not paid by a church, but I have degrees in Theology and Psychology and do counsel a lot of church people. Some years ago I had to make a serious attitude adjustment about my role as a servant/minister. It happened like this.

I was very busy trying to get what seemed like a thousand things done before leaving for a three-day speaking trip on the East Coast. There hadn’t been time to prepare my talks, so I was under a lot of pressure when a friend, a fine Christian woman, called. A couple she knew ws having marital problems. “They might call you,” she said, “because they could not agree on either a minister or a psychiatrist.” But my friend thought it crucial that I see them if at all possible.

It seems that the majority of people I’ve counseled with lately have had marital problems. Even though I was dead tired, I agreed to talk with them, hoping they wouldn’t call. But sure enough, at almost midnight the telephone rang. The man called me “Reverend” Miller (in what I thought was a condescending tone).

“Keith Miller,” I said with some definiteness. “I am a layman.”

“I’d like to make an appointment to see you,” he said without any details or preliminary remarks. Just when I started to ask who was calling, it occurred to me that he was the husband of the couple having troubles. He was, but he had the impatient and imperious tone of a power player totally insensitive to other people’s feelings, and I could see how his marriage might “have a few problems.” So realizing the man was under pressure and had probably put off calling all evening, I set the appointment for one o’clock the following day at our house.

I was a little irritated, since seeing them meant driving five miles from my writing hideout in the middle of the day. But I asked myself, “What kind of Christian are you if you can’t help another human being in trouble?” But I still felt angry that this guy had talked to me as if I were some sort of hired hand. I was only seeing him as a friend, with no intention of charging him as a counselor. So I prayed to be open to the man, and I was (at least consciously) ready to do that by the time I got home the next day at 12:30.

The telephone rang at 1:10 and the man said, “Something has come up, and I won’t be able to make it to your house.” I started to tell him he could just forget it, but then it occurred to me that he was slick enough that he might be avoiding the conference purposely. And from what my friend had said, this couple could be in serious trouble. So I agreed to see him the following day.

We had a good visit, but it was apparent that their marital problems were severe. By that time my schedule was really pressing. Not long after the husband left, his wife called, and after a long conversation, she asked for an appointment. Knowing how hard it is to wait when things seem to be closing in on you, I agreed to see her at 11:00 the following morning. (All of this was happening long before I learned about boundaries—and how Jesus set them.)

I rushed home at 10:55 to find that the woman had just called and left word: something had come up and she was not going to be able to come. I was furious! Three days had been fouled up by these people. They didn’t even have the courtesy to consider how much inconvenience I was going through for them. I wanted to call and tell them that one of their problems was “self-centeredness.” And further I wanted to inform them that I was very busy myself…and then it hit me: how important I must think I am if a thing like this can make me as mad as it did. Here were two people in the agony of struggling to keep their home together—with no telling what other complications—and I was incensed that they were treating me like a common servant…when that is what I claim I’ve committed my life to be: a servant to Christ and his suffering people. But my reaction told me that secretly I must want to be treated like a big-shot writer and counselor. That discovery eventually led me to a treatment center and the beginning of a whole new understanding of myself—and of what it might mean truly to want to be a servant.

So I don’t know what you need to do, D.M. But years ago when the question you asked first arose in my life, the search for an answer led me to have to face my denial about how much of my ministry has been about building a reputation as an outstanding Christian. And for me that was a very painful—but eventually transforming—discovery.

“For the self-flattery of our nature is very subtle and few can discern it. Secretly it pursues only its own ends, though meanwhile its outward conduct is such, that it seems to us we have but the single aim of pleasing God, though in actual fact this is not so. . . . So if a man does not watch himself well, he may begin some activity with the sole purpose of pleasing the Lord, but later, little by little, introduce into it a self-interest, which makes him find in it also a satisfaction of his own desires, and this to such an extent that the will of God becomes completely forgotten.”

Lorenzo Scupoli, Unseen Warfare

“In renunciation it is not the comforts, luxuries and pleasures that are hard to give up. Many could forego heavy meals, a full wardrobe, a fine house, et. cetera: it is the ego that they cannot forego. The self that is wrapped, suffocated in material things—which include social position, popularity, and power—is the only self they know and they will not abandon it for an illusory new self . . . which they may never attain.”

Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, His Life and Message for the World

Forgive me, Lord, and help me not to look for the respect and acclaim of people but to be willing to die to my self-concern enough to accept them just as they are. And help D.M. and anyone else who may be struggling with what it means to be Your servant and minister to your other bruised and broken people. Thank you that you have helped me become more direct and to set better boundaries in contacts with controlling people with regard to their keeping appointments, if they want help. Amen.

And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus in Mark 10: 42-45

The Death Throes of an Omniscient “Helper”

Keith, my college aged kids and my husband claim that I am trying to control them when I offer suggestions-when all I am trying to do is help them. How can I help them see that I want them to make their own decisions?

 

Ooooh!  That question strikes too close to home. Listen to a telephone conversation from my journal that I had with a daughter about to graduate from college:  “Of course you can do whatever you want to, honey.  I just want you to be happy.”  I sigh into the phone to my almost grown daughter in college.  “But, I think you ought to call her back and tell her you won’t do it.” As I say these things into the telephone, I notice how my voice is both raised and syrupy in a strangely familiar way.

Silence on the other end of the line. And in my imagination saw in that instant the face of my dear departed enmeshing mother who always “only wanted the best for me” and always wanted me to make “my own choices”-unless they were unlike the choices she would make. She was amazing, thoughtful and generous to a fault, but she could control everyone in the family within a hundred-mile radius with a disappointed sigh.

Good Lord, can it be that without ever knowing it I have become just like her and am controlling my family?

Well, I hope everything turns out okay,” I say into the void on the line, realizing belatedly that my daughter had just wanted to share with me and I’d taken over again and tried to “fix” her, implying unconsciously that she couldn’t figure out what to do if I didn’t-and she hadn’t even asked for my advice. I’d screwed it up again-for the thousandth time.

“Goodbye, Dad,” I hear the discouraged and irritated voice as she hangs up-and I remember how much her voice sounded like my own younger voice when I used to come up against that wall of sugary (but steely) shaming control my mother unconsciously used on me.

I want to call my daughter back and tell her that I love her and am only trying to help, that I only give suggestions “for her own good.” But then I remember that it never worked when my mother did that to me.  And with a start I realize, “Oh my gosh-it’s true!  I’ve turned into my mother-and I never saw it coming.”

As I’m sitting here looking out at the waving sea grass on the dunes, I realize the horrible truth about me: I try to control and “fix” people close to me because I feel uncomfortable when they don’t do things the way I’d do them. I’m really giving advice to make me feel more comfortable and less afraid of what might happen.

I seem to feel, at some primordial level, that I am the unofficial director of the life dramas each of my family members has been given to act in. Some white and gray crying gulls flutter and settle among some Goat’s Foot Morning Glory vines winding their way across the big dune outside my window. I realize that when I, unbidden, meddle in the lives of my dear ones, I am playing God as I try to be the “producer and director” of a drama in which I am only another actor-who hasn’t yet gotten his own lines straight.

What can I do?? How can I tell whether I’m controlling or making helpful suggestions?

I called a friend whose kids are grown, and ask my question. And my friend said, “Keith, if I want to see whether I’m actually helping instead of controlling, I try to notice what happens-what their response is-when I think I’m helping them. If they get mad at me and clam up when I ‘help’ them,” he said, “it’s a pretty good clue that I am doing something besides helping.”

Now-25 years later-when I feel the urge to “help” (teach) one of my (now grown) children, I can sometimes say, “Did you just share with me or would you like a suggestion?” And they usually say, “Thanks, Dad. I’m just sharing.”  But sometimes they say, “No, I’m asking what you think I ought to do.” Then and only then do I feel ok about making concrete suggestions.  This new way of “helping” has made life a lot more peaceful-when I can do it.

God, help me to quit playing your role and ‘teaching’ my family all the time. Today I can see again that I’m just not cast right for your part.  In Jesus’ name. Amen.

 “Fathers don’t exasperate your children.” Ephesians 6:4 The Message

 “Don’t be in any rush to become a teacher, my friends. Teaching is highly responsible work. Teachers are held to the strictest standards. And none of us is perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths.” James 3:1 The Message

The Silent Gift of Love

Keith, what is the best way you’ve found to begin to convey the message that they are loved by God to people who are very cognitive and scientifically oriented and don’t even believe there is a God?

Recently I ran across the following conversation between a camp counselor and a camper who finally decided to become a Christian:

Counselor: When did you decide you wanted to be a Christian?
Camper: When you learned my name.

When I first became a Christian, I wanted to tell everyone all about Christianity. But it didn’t take long to discover that most of my contemporaries outside of church (and inside) had a strong and efficient resistance to people trying to change them or talk them into something new. And in my mind I only wanted to tell them they were loved.

What I gradually came to believe was that just saying words—even very true and holy words—is not what is meant by loving people as a Christian. At the office, I had learned some things about a kind of preparatory loving I had seen Jesus doing in the New Testament—a kind of a “tuning in” to the person who is with you, a sensitivity that makes anything you may say later about God much more authentic and understandable.

In fact, I began to learn that talking is seldom the most powerful way to get people’s real attention. Much to my surprise, I found that listening is a much more effective way of giving my presence to somebody when I am with them. It’s as if my listening attention were a spotlight that God has given me to focus. I can focus my attention in the past, I can focus it out in the future, or I can focus it into the lives of the people around me.

By personal experience I know that, when somebody really gives me his or her attention, that person draws me gently out of my cold tight absorption with myself and into the healing arena of the “in between”—that space that exists only between people. It is like magic. In such an exchange with another person I often find myself moving into the area of the personal, and the situation changes. When I am listening to somebody this way, even in a crowd of people, I’ve noticed that I am often watching them and listening as if no one else were there. I imagine a glass bubble is around the two of us, and that only we are sharing this special moment of attention.

I have become convinced that what we call the agape love of Christ rides down the beam of our honest attention into people’s lives. And this seems to be true whether I am involved with my wife, a child, or a stranger being encountered for the first time. In a way, I think this focusing on the other person is a taste of the greatest kind of love there is, for in a strange way we are giving people our lives,a second at a time, when we give them our undivided attention.

As a counselor, I have talked to many people who have said in different ways about an estranged mate, “I don’t expect him (her) to do a lot for me. I just want him (her) to know that I exist. I want his (her)attention!

Years ago, when I was director of Laity Lodge, we had scheduled Elton Trueblood to speak at a weekend conference. That weekend, a young woman came from hundreds of miles away just to be at a conference where he was speaking. None of us knew this young woman. But she had heard about the conference from a friend and had come this long distance by herself.

One of the things we did that weekend was to divide into small groups, and one of the small-group activities was to go around the circle and answer the question, “What is the most important single encounter you’ve had with another human being (not counting members of your family)?”In one group, after a few people had responded, it became the young stranger’s turn.

She looked up and said, “Well, when I was a child, maybe ten years old, Elton Trueblood came to our city to speak. My daddy was an elder in the church and in charge of the program, and so the speaker stayed in our home for several days. At the dinner table during that week, Dr. Trueblood would ask the adults questions and then listen attentively to their answers. But then he would turn to me and ask me a question, and he would listen to my answer with the same care he had given to the adults. Then he would ask me another question about something I had said! He did this all week long. He treated me as if I were an intelligent, sensitive, mature Christian. And that week I made up my mind that I was going to spend the rest of my life becoming one.”

Once when I was a new Christian, I got very discouraged about the church I was attending. I read a book by Sam Shoemaker. I wrote him a personal note telling how I felt about the church and thanking him for writing the book—not really expecting an answer—since he was a famous author. But in a few days I got a reply from him, obviously hand-typed on a typewriter with some keys not striking regularly. It was a single paragraph that said something like, “Don’t leave. We need people who see like you see.”He sent “prayers.”

I was astounded.I had never written anything nor had I met anyone who knew this man. And he had not only heard what I was feeling, but he had taken the time to write a personal note to me. I looked at that note every day for a month, and I stayed afloat emotionally and spiritually because he had paid attention to me and taken me seriously. Consequently, when I became a writer, I answered virtually every letter I received for the next thirty years.

“Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open up with God, this generous Father in heaven.”Matthew 5:16 The Message

“Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I love you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples—when they see the love you have for each other.”John 13:35 The Message

Dear Lord, thank you for the miraculous power of personal, loving attention that you offer to each of us.And thank you that by simply listening and responding to people, we can sometimes help to nourish the transformational life of loving you offer us in Jesus.Help us to pass it on to someone I meet today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Stay in Touch

Subscribe to receive special offers and to be notified when Square One is released.

You have Successfully Subscribed!