'been pondering this stuff lately, also "acceptance" I think.
Had a talk with some folks a few nights ago about it, and a big part of it (for me, right now) is about the difference between forgiveness and pretending (or really thinking) that everything's okay.
And as I think about it, and as stuff comes up, "do you forgive me?" and "do you still love me?" swim together and overlap a lot, though they're different.
And both are different from, "can we go back to the way things were?" - I don't understand forgiveness outside a context where both people take responsibility (though often it's more on one or the other) for racidally (at the roots) changing the problem that requires forgiveness in the first place - or maybe I can understand forgiveness outside that context, but never reconciliation.
Sigh, and I really want to believe in that of God in everyone and ANSWER it, but sometimes it feels so cleverly hidden with so many barbs and traps, what do you do?
1 comment:
Your next-to-last paragraph went straight to my heart, since I myself am struggling, in a relationship I'm in right now, to offer a forgiveness that does not ask to go back to the way things were. It isn't easy!
I get the impression, reading Matthew 18, that Christ was teaching forgiveness in the context of laboring to work things out. And the Sermon on the Mount, at Matthew 5:21-26, obliges us to try to work things out whenever we become angry at one another.
So I don't think it's a matter of just forgiving and leaving it at that; it's a matter of forgiving and simultaneously working on setting things aright. But that's still not the same as asking to go back to the way things were.
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