Dear Old Friend,
Ever since I wrote my last letter, where I talked about
shame, I’ve been thinking about how God made us so that we will feel bad about
ourselves when we “miss the mark” and do things which we know are wrong, as an
alert to wake us up and turn us to him. Conversely, he made us so that we
will feel good when we do what we know is right, particularly when we offer
grace to someone, which makes us want to do it more often.
That led me to think about how I have been acting lately.
I’ve been under a lot of pressure at work, feeling like I am
being crushed by all of the demands and expectations. Because of the
nature of my job, I end up spending a great deal of time, which I don’t have to
spare, fixing problems which other people have created by making, what I
view to be, careless mistakes. My
tolerance for these ‘careless mistakes’ has become virtually non-existent. All too often I have found myself snapping and snarling at
my co-workers, sometimes in front of others; or, I have fired off critical
emails detailing what they have done wrong and exactly how they need to do
things differently from now on.
The thing is, I love those people, and when I am in my right
mind, I want nothing but good things for them; so, as a result of my behavior,
I haven’t been feeling very good about myself.
Here I am, touting grace, but doing a pretty poor
job of being gracious to the people I spend more time with than anyone else.
So, I made a decision last weekend that I would stop trying to beat my co-workers into
submission; and, instead, I would be patient and forgiving in the face of their
errors. I imagined their grateful and
relieved faces as I showered them with mercy and kindness, instead of berating
them for their failings. I knew we would
all feel better!
On the day I returned to work, however, that resolve
disappeared before I ever made it to my desk, as I was swarmed by people with
issues the minute I walked in the door. Soon
I didn’t even remember that I had intended to be a kinder, gentler version of
myself, as I huffed and puffed at people who, as I saw it, were making my life
miserable with their inattentiveness to important details.
In my car on the way home that night, shame at my failure
swept over me. Guiltily, I remembered the parable of the Unmerciful Servant found in Matthew 18. The chapter begins with Peter, Jesus’
disciple, asking how many times he was required to forgive his brother, and offering the number seven as a generous estimate.
Jesus’ response was, “Not seven times, but seventy seven times”, which
didn’t really mean that at 78 Peter could cut his brother off; that number
actually represented limitless forgiveness.
Then, Jesus told Peter a story to illustrate his answer. He said that the Kingdom of Heaven was like a
king who wanted to settle accounts with his subjects who owed him money, so he
called in a man who owed him the equivalent of many millions of dollars. The point was, it was so great a debt
that it was completely beyond the realm of possibility for the man to ever
repay it. Because the man couldn’t pay,
the King gave the order that the man, his wife, his children and all that he had, were
to be sold to repay what little could be repaid of the debt.
The man fell on his knees and begged for mercy, saying that,
if the king would be patient, he would pay back everything he owed. Instead of taking that worthless offer, the king
felt sorry for him and, in an act of extreme compassion, cancelled the entire
debt and let him go!
Then, when the forgiven man left the
palace, he “found” one of his fellow servants who owed him a couple of bucks. Jesus
doesn’t say he ran into him, there’s the inference that he went to look for the
guy, and he grabbed him and began to choke him, demanding that he pay him
the two dollars he had borrowed. The
fellow servant (I translated that as co-worker) begged him to be patient and promised to pay him back, but the
man refused and had his ‘debtor’ thrown into prison until the debt was satisfied.
Miserably, I thought of myself as being like the bad guy in
the story. I know how much God has
forgiven me; and most assuredly it was a debt I could never repay. And, yet, there I was, being a jerk at work! Then, suddenly it struck me that this was the point Jesus was making: We are all like that man to some extent. Jesus wasn’t telling Peter the story to make
him feel guilty; he was simply describing what all of us do. We are all capable of being grateful for the
tremendous miracle of forgiveness which we have been given and being, simultaneously,
unforgiving toward others; and, we are so dim-witted we usually don’t even
recognize we are doing it.
Jesus told the story so that one day, after Jesus' death and
resurrection, Peter would “get it”.
Peter, and everyone who understands that Jesus paid our entire debt on the cross, can
clearly see, through this story, the absurdity of wanting to put a limit on our
forgiveness of others, since we have been the recipients of such lavish pardon. I realized that, although I am similar to the
man in the story, by God’s grace I am more like Peter. Thankfully, God is teaching me that the
antidote to a hard heart is not more guilt, but a deepening understanding of the
boundless love and mercy I have been and am being given.
My coworkers know that I love them and that as soon as I
finish yelling at them I forgive them and go back to loving them again; and,
blessedly, they generously forgive me for my rants. My hope and prayer is that grace will finally
so completely saturate my heart that my rants will stop before they start; but,
until then, I will gratefully rest on the promise of God’s limitless
forgiveness, made possible through his Son.
Love Always,
Bonnie