Forgiving Spirit

My wife is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. Her example to not hold grudges or think about negative thoughts about people is amazing. She is the most accepting and non-judgemental person you could find who is always quick to forgive. As I have lived with her and have done life with an angel, I have grown more and more into what I feel like is another Jesus trait that He gave us to follow. When I experience someone doing something wrong to me I immediately experience a little inner turmoil. I always think, “Why would they do that to me?” As arrogant as that thought is, I feel that it may be pretty common. If I look at all the bad that is being done to people around the world and I really think about that, what makes me any different to receive poor treatment from another human being. There are millions of innocent people out there who have been treated a million times worse than I have and I get upset when someone cuts me off on the highway.

I live in Chicago and one thing that is actually bad about Chicago is the traffic. I live on the west side and I often take the Eisenhower expressway toward the loop to go running on the lake or do something downtown. If you decide to get off the Eisenhower and go either towards Wisconsin or Indiana via 90/94 you usually experience a delay getting off the ramp. I can’t tell you how this experience causes me to sin so often but because I struggle with how human beings treat each other, it causes me to sin a lot. What happens is, there is actually usually quite a delay on the two right lanes about a mile before you can even get off. What people do to make the delay even longer, they drive in the two left lanes and then when they find a tiny gap they squeeze their way in. In elementary school we use to call this “cutting” and if anyone do it, we would pout and cry and tell the teacher. Well, in this situation all you can do is pout to yourself, feel sorry for yourself because you waited your turn in the two right lanes. This is so frustrating and just thinking about it gets me mad. The problem is, allowing this to get to me, I create turmoil in my heart and sacrifice the fullness that God wants for me in my life. Now you could say that it is just human to feel this way and that is what we say to a lot of things but what if we discipline our minds to have a heart and mind that is quick to forgive and not so quick to get angry and think, “How could they do that to me?” When you think about it, how often do we do things like this to others? Maybe were at the grocery store and we don’t feel like putting the cart in the corral so we leave it in the parking lot. Maybe we drop something on the ground and don’t feel like picking it up because it may make our hands dirty so we leave it for someone else to pick it up. These are just a few things that we may choose to not do but it affects someone else and makes their job harder. If we really think about it, why not just forgive people? There is so much freedom in forgiveness.
I remember when I was in college I was reading a book and in the book it started discussing a situation where a father was having the “sex talk” with their child and how awkward this was. All of a sudden I started weeping because of the void that was created in my life because of my father’s drinking and his lack of intentionally being in my life to teach me about things like the “birds and the bees.” I immediately started writing a forgiveness letter to my father because I felt this overwhelming feeling to express forgiveness towards him. I remember feeling so much being lifted off off my heart and mind during this process. I was taking the shackles off and through forgiving, experienced freedom like I never experienced up to that point.