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My wife left me 17 years ago on April Fool's Day to pursue happiness in some other direction. At the time we'd been married 18 years and had 2 teen daughters.
I'll spare you most of the details but I will say that I found out on the first night of our honeymoon that she was an active alcoholic after months of telling me just the opposite. But I was naive and wanted to believe what she told me.....and did believe it. Then I found that everything had been a lie.
I was hurt and angry at being duped...what had been love was morphing into resentment. We spent the next 18 years locked in a struggle for truth and for control...of me. She wanted total and complete control, and I refused to be controlled. It was not a happy marriage.
Then she left.
At the time, speaking about forgiveness was new for me.
While I was in the deepest part of the valley I had to walk...God chose to guide me out of the valley. But He did it in a way that caught me totally off guard.
You see, I was ready for Him to rain lightning bolts and brimstone down on her townhouse to vindicate me; I was the one following His commands and thought I deserved at least the satisfaction of watching her feel His wrath.
That's not what God chose to do. Yes, He did in fact deal with her, but as for me, He chose to show me areas of my life where I needed to improve. What?!? I was shocked. Why would He kick me while I was down? I felt low enough already...did I really need to have my deficiencies pointed out to me right then?
The answer, of course, was yes.
God took me to the proverbial woodshed several times and made me understand what was wrong with me and what needed to change...and why. It's really easy to say the words about God always knowing what's best for us, especially when we happen to like what's best for us. But when He tells us that there are some basic things at the core of who we are that are not good...well...that's not so easy to hear, especially if we're already broken down.
I spent many hours over perhaps 2 years or so learning from God. He taught...I listened...I learned...I changed.
God knew what I didn't understand at that time...He knew that there is no better time to teach us than when we are utterly broken, lying in a heap on the floor. That's the point where we're the most teachable. For me to be fixed, I had first to be broken.
Now...what does this have to do with forgiveness? A lot actually.
Like most people, I was not a very good forgiver. I honestly didn't really know what it meant to forgive. Sure, I could probably have given a dictionary definition of forgiveness, but in practical terms, I had no clue how to forgive someone.
I went to college in the early to mid 70's...ok...I can see a few of you doing the math...let me help you...I'm 71. Anyway, it was a time of liberal drug use and there was a saying on many posters at that time that said, "I got stoned and missed it". Well, I wish I had a similar poster about forgiveness that says "I got bitter and angry and missed it".
I didn't want to forgive my ex for what she did. I was hurt...I was angry...I felt used...I was thrown away like a piece of trash...and then on top of that, I had to give away a large percentage of everything materially that I had worked for my entire working life.
This was not fair...it was not right...I tried to keep the marriage together...she refused to keep trying...and I got the short end of every stick, plus the humiliation of my church (at that time) jerking me out of the leadership position I was in because of lies she told the pastors about me.
She turned one of my daughters against me, and that daughter wanted nothing further to do with me. But then...in stepped God. While He was changing me, as I already described, He also gave me a bonus lesson. He taught me that I have choices. What choices?
He taught me that I was perfectly free to spend every waking moment resenting my ex for lying to me from our very first date; I could daydream every day about mean-spirited things I could say to her...about things that I wished would happen to her. I could stay angry...I could grasp the idea of retribution so tightly that my fingers would become part of the very fabric of revenge. In short, I was free to live every day in anger and resentment and thereby MISS the beauty and grace right in front of me...every day.
I had choices. I could CHOOSE to NOT do any of that. I could choose to accept what had been done and spend my time figuring out where to go from here.
I could resent and hate all day staying buried in a mental picture of the past...OR I could live in the present and spend effort on how to get through the day with the best possible outcome...that day. I could spend every moment in total blindness to the grace, mercy, love and beauty that was within arm's reach...OR I could let go of the veil and see and live.
I learned that I did not have to allow the scenarios of the past to replay in my mind and grind on me again and again. In fact, I didn't have to think about the past at all.
OK...so I learned gradually to do that. Does that mean I forgave her? Because when she came around or something came up and I had to deal with her, I certainly didn't have any warm fuzzy feelings about her...so did I forgive or did I not forgive?
For me, there were 2 real turning points in this process:
1. First, there was the realization that I could choose my thougts, and I could choose to not be a slave to the wrongs that were done to me.
2. Second, there was a point where I chose to relinquish my moral right of retribution. I gave up on the idea that we will ever be "even", and more importantly, I gave up on the idea that I needed to be even. We will not be even, but I no longer care.
Getting even has no allure for me any more because it would mean having to go back and relive events and feelings and actions and hurtful words. It would not help me to take one single step forward in my life. I don't need those hurts to do any more damage to me.
I have chosen to live my life in the present, looking toward the future. Are there times when a memory comes around and bad feelings set in? Yes, there are.
I'm never going to have pleasant feelings about her or what she did to me, but that's got little to do with forgiveness. Forgiveness to me, happened when I learned how to choose to live my own life going forward and when I chose to give up any mental right of retribution.
What she does is between her and God, but what I do is between me and God...and He told me to get up, accept reality, learn to let go of what happened, learn to live in the present, and focus on what's wrong with me, and leave the rest to Him.
Submitted by THOMAS HAYWOOD
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