F-word series: Feeling framed to forgiveness

Ok, I know, I’ve written about forgiveness before.  Deal is, it crops up over and over.  AND OVER.

A lot of bad things happened the last week or so…good things too, but we tend to focus on the bad.  I did not get my goal for Zoe at the IEP (an extra day).  The daycare kicked her out after one hour. (“Worst case of autism”  Really???)  I was doing double duty with work all week and contemplating my future.  Today it crescendoed with…well, let’s just say a really bad thing and leave it at that.  (Seriously, Lord, does the Really Bad have to happen EVERY 12-14 months??)

Good stuff happened too, actually, of which I can’t speak except to say my boss really helped me.  I want you to know that there WAS balance.  But I got a bit off my rocker with today’s incident, and I’m a bit freaked out  and I don’t know, exactly, how to resolve this.

What I do know is that for some reason, I got up yesterday morning and read all of Romans chapter 8.  A friend recommended a few scriptures in it last night, and my pastor had recommended reading the whole thing.  So I read: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  It struck me like a thunderbolt.  GOD.  Creator of every single thing, even time and space, is for me.  That is the beauty of Christianity, and why, after many tried and failed to make me a Christian, I eventually came to it, humbly, after much arguing with God.

That armed me for what I DID NOT KNOW would happen later that day.  (Yep, I do file that under no accidents, in case you were wondering.)  But after the tears and the calls and the nonsense, after the calming and the deep breathing and the hot shower, after curling up with work at my desk, I realized that what this person needs from me is a few things:

1. prayer: yea, we have to pray for our enemies.  And  oddly enough, just on Wednesday, a day after I’d thought I had none that I hadn’t forgiven, I remembered someone who I am extremely resentful of, and bitter, and still angry at, even thought it’s been forever.  It’s that “he’s no good” type of anger, not the passionate kind, just the kind that can’t bring a once-close person to mind without a nasty attitude.  Yea, gotta work on forgiving that dude.

2. forgiveness: ok, yesterday’s incident involved some…stretches by the party involved, which is why I felt framed.  How do we turn that into forgiveness?  How do we go forward and forgive someone when they are still actively trying to harm us?  Christians believe that there was God up there, dying, tortured, in pure agony, saying “Father forgive them”.  (If you read “The Case for Christ”, you get an in-depth, dispassionate yet gory medical clue in as to what Jesus suffered and it is PURE NASTY. Gave me the willies, and I’m fairly desensitized to stuff like that.)

What’s the answer?  I don’t know, but what I’m gonna do is say out loud that I forgive her, until I believe, and I’m going to ask for divine help.  I don’t have to do the hard stuff alone, but I have to do it.

And that, friends, is part of what this F-word series is about.  To get beyond and really become the people we want to be, we have to do the hard stuff, even when it’s gut-wrenching, painful, and the entire world including our friends say, “No, don’t!”  Wanna be fabulous?  Do the tough stuff, the stuff your soul is crying out to change.  There are no shortcuts, but oh, man, does it feel good when you get to the other side!

So, what f-words are flying around your head that you’d like me to deal with? I know I haven’t grappled with Fat, or Friends, and I’d love to revisit Fearless.  Share your requests and I’ll see what I can do!