Or… How Shall We Then Forgive? Part 7

I was going to title my last post: Dealing With Our Enemies Safely. Upon further reflection, I scrapped it because I realized I was overstating what was possible.

I’ll come clean: It’s not safe loving your enemies. God calls us to love, and love is inescapably vulnerable. Boundaries are good and helpful. If you weren’t fortunate enough to learn them growing up, a good therapist can help with that. Psychologists Cloud and Townsend have published a number of books along this vein, which are also very helpful. One of my favorites is the incredibly practical Safe People. Not only do they help you recognize the characteristics of safe and unsafe people. They also coach you through self-examination to become a more safe person for others yourself. Pretty balanced approach, I’d say.

Books can’t replace therapy, because they can’t listen to you. They can however help speed your healing and so mitigate the cost of therapy, which is always a good thing.

As great as healthy boundaries are, they can’t prevent us from getting hurt. Jesus got crucified, and he was pretty frank about the fact that following him leads to something of that sort. C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, famously wrote:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

That brings us right back to our need to forgive. I’ve found there is a coming-back-around-to-it nature to forgiveness.

We forgive, only to find a need for it in our path again. Sometimes that’s because a person keeps sinning. Or maybe they don’t repeat the original offense, but they continue to live in denial, which is essentially to lie about what happened. Other times the event is over, but we’re left with trauma symptoms that bring the event back up in our minds so that we have to mentally release our enemies to God again. We forgive in increments as we process our pain.

Jesus’ friend Peter asked him once, “Lord, how many times do I have to forgive my brother?” I can sure relate to Peter. Trying to be generous, Peter threw out a guess: “Seven times?” True to form, Jesus eschewed easy answers and replied, “Seventy times seven.” Ooof.

I was bemoaning the often ongoing nature of forgiveness to my friend Linda one day. “Sara, I think seventy times seven might be more the rule than the exception,” she conceded empathetically. The validation of how hard it is helped. It was also nice to know I wasn’t necessarily doing it wrong, just because I was having to do it again.

In some ways, forgiveness feels like a vaccination against the virus of evil. In other ways it is more like the face mask and hand sanitizer that repetitively protect both me and others in an unsafe world.

♰♰♰

If you’d like to read the full conversation between Jesus and Peter, you can find it in Matthew 18.