Limitless Forgiveness

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