Shadow raised a couple of interesting points in her impromptu post. Let’s talk about them.
Take her second statement first: even if she forgives Missy, nothing will change.
It may be true. That’s hard to swallow sometimes, that we may go through the tough work of forgiveness and find that nothing has changed. Nothing outward, anyway. As I pointed out in the last post, forgiveness isn’t really about the other person anyway. It’s about you. (Yes, Shadow, for once you can say it’s all about YOU.) It’s about your peace and healing, about your relationship with God, about your relationship with the other people in your life. You can forgive someone without ever seeing them again, let alone hearing them apologize, and the effects for you are the same. They have their own burdens to bear. Your forgiveness frees you from your burden.
Let’s be clear, though. Forgiveness doesn’t mean making yourself a doormat. It doesn’t mean going back so the person can dish out the same over and over and over again. An abused wife can forgive her abuser; that doesn’t mean she has to go back to him and continue to be abused. Sometimes relational ties have to be broken for your own safety and well-being. But you still have to forgive. Yes, maybe Missy will still be in Shadow’s face even if Shadow forgives her. Shadow may continue to have to take evasive measures when Missy is around. At the same time, forgiveness may mean she feels freer to come out of the bedroom and spend time with her human. Shadow’s circumstances may not change, but her life will be free from the bondage of bitterness.
As for Shadow’s first point, that she won’t forgive unless Missy comes begging, I’ll let Paul words to the Colossians answer that.
“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (Colossians 3:13, NIV).
This verse doesn’t say a thing about the person crawling on their belly and begging for forgiveness. There’s no debate over who wins the argument. When you extend forgiveness to another person or cat, repentant or not, it’s not supposed to be conditional on their present or future behavior. You’re simply to forgive.
During a particularly tough time in our church’s life, our pastor, Rodney Mruk, said something that forever changed the way I viewed forgiveness. “To forgive is to release the other person from the obligation to make it right.”
That was a revelation to me. So simple! Yet it expresses the same thing as Paul says in Colossians 3:13. When you forgive a person who has wronged you, you may try to heal the relationship, but you expect nothing from them. You release them--spiritually, emotionally and physically--from the need to fix anything they’ve done. They are under no further obligation. Whatever changes they make are between them and God.
And who wins? When you forgive, you do. When you withhold forgiveness, nobody does.
Withholding our forgiveness in a personal relationship might not seem as serious as, say, the search for peace in the Middle East. The consequences, though, can be just as devastating in our own lives. We can become twisted by bitterness, acid territory where no one wants to step for fear of getting burned. Families can be torn apart as those not even involved in the conflict are expected to take sides. Or, as in Shadow’s case, other cats may have to tread lightly for fear of getting scratched by Missy or Shadow in the middle of one of their battles.
God doesn’t give us arbitrary commandments. He tells us to do things for our own good, things that will help us and not harm us. And God doesn’t tell us to forgive some people some of the time, or to forgive when they apologize, or to forgive a certain number of times. No, He simply tells us to forgive. Period.
“Then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’”
“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
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