forgiveness

The Little Word “When”

/ Jaimie / Leave a comment

I’ve always felt a little bad for Job. Here’s this righteous man of God who’s so amazing that the Lord actually brags about him (Job 1:8 “8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”) yet everything that could go wrong goes wrong FAST! He loses everything and still remains faithful, a bit whiny perhaps, but faithful. His friends spend many chapters lecturing and criticizing him. I don’t really blame the friends though. Isn’t that our nature to decide that someone MUST have done something wrong to deserve all of the bad in their life. We are the first to jump in and criticize. Lord, help me to not be like Job’s friends. But I digress…

job

We know the story. In the end, God shows up and speaks out of a whirlwind revealing his awe-inspiring power and shaking earth and sky with his glory. Job, the righteous man, feels as though he is no better than the dust beneath his feet in the presence of The Holy One. Job laments that there is no mediator between this awesome God and lowly man. We read it and rejoice knowing that we have such a mediator now in Jesus Christ. The God who shakes the heaven and sees Earth tremble at the sound of His voice, loves us so much that He sent His son to make a way. That always blows my mind. Then God in His glory restores to Job twice what he’d lost to begin with.

I realized a little word I’d missed before. In Job 42:10 it says that God restored Job’s losses WHEN he prayed for his friends. Before Job was given back double, he had to forgive his annoying friends. This righteous man who would certainly be justifiably angry at his so-called friends who came against him the second calamity hit, had to be reconciled to them BEFORE his blessings came. I’d missed that little word “when” before.

If you desire the blessings and favor of God in your life, do yourself a favor and love your neighbor. When you walk in love, purity and forgiveness, there is nothing that can stop you! The blessings of God follow the believer. We don’t have to work for them or conjure them up. They are a consequence of a life lived in service. Don’t wait around and waste time looking for apologies or feeling justified having an attitude. Get over yourself and forgive and the rest will fall into place.

Okay, now the practical portion. I vividly remember being a young, hot-headed gal who thought it was a nice theory to forgive, but I couldn’t figure out how. It can be hard sometimes! Here’s my practical solution and Job demonstrated it perfectly. Pray! You may not want to. You probably won’t feel like it. If you are having trouble forgiving someone, pray for them. Keep praying for them. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to continue to let them mistreat you. When you start praying for them, you loose the hold they have on you and forgiveness comes. It is a process. Be patient with yourself and when those feelings of anger start to rise up, push them back through prayer. It’s the most practical thing you can do. And as the Bible says in Job, when you pray, God’s blessings are released. You become free!

Bitterness

/ Jaimie / 1 Comment

Breech
When trust dies
Wrung out like laundry
Hung on lines of self-pronounced justice
Vindicated
When we feel the right is ours
Stretched on racks of ethics
Thin like lines that mark the face of the worn
Tired
When forgiveness takes a backseat to rightness
Dripping like oil down the beard of the judge
Anointing poured out missing its target
Who can stand when the finger points back?

Forgiveness

/ Jaimie / 4 Comments

Gripping my heart, the things I thought I’d let go, fingers flexed to squeeze out tears and the strangest of fears. I thought I’d forgiven. I guess there’s still work to be done.

I had a strange dream a few weeks ago about someone I haven’t thought about in years. This person happened to be on the short list of two individuals I can think of in my life that I had the hardest time forgiving. I don’t really know what brought about this reminiscence but just before I woke up I heard the Lord speaking to my heart that we were going back until I’d dealt with it once and for all.  I really didn’t think I had any issue with this person whatsoever anymore.

Now the other one on the short list, I can acknowledge, still haunts me from time to time. There are days when, though I’ve forgiven repeatedly, the disgust and anger find a way of coming up and sitting in the back of my throat like bile. My husband is so great at catching these moments and reminding me to get it under control. I’m so thankful for him.

This week, I realized how much more work I need to do in this area. There’s a difference between shoving the feelings aside and dealing with them until they’ve been fully uprooted from the soil of the soul. Maybe true forgiveness is a process in which God is faithful enough to remind us about the roots still clinging tightly at just the right moment when we are strong enough to tug them out. Maybe He works on different sections of the garden of our heart because we can’t handle the pain if He did it all at once. I don’t know. I can only relate my experience and my shortcomings.

My ex-husband was a drug addict (I optimistically choose to use the word “was” there in hopes that he is in fact doing better though the bile of cynicism is attempting to creep up even now as I write). The entirety of our marriage was a roller coaster of issues between drug relapses, outbursts of wrath and malice toward me and our kids, pornography, prostitutes and strippers, finally leaving me no choice but divorce. I am so thankful that God protected me and my children through all of the chaos and that He’s brought us to where we are today. I believe that these experiences have served to make me stronger and prepared me for my life. As Corrie Ten Boom said, “This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future only He can see”. Still, there are memories, I’d love to forget.

My husband and I have been helping and counseling a family recently who are dealing with issues very similar to my old life and consequently, I am facing memories of the past that aren’t pleasant. In one situation this week, I found myself paralyzed after flashbacks of certain situations came flooding in. Then all of a sudden, with the anger and pain of the memories, a bizarre fear crept in that maybe someday my perfectly amazing husband, who has restored my faith in mankind, could somehow fall victim to some of these atrocious sins and I could end up right back where I came from dealing with the same issues over again.  In the brain, it makes no sense, but in the realm of the soul where my emotions are being sloshed together with pregnancy hormones it hit me like an avalanche and I realized that maybe I’m not as “over it” as I once thought I was. 

All of this, though painful and raw, causes me to be so thankful! In His infinite mercy, God is allowing me to see the areas that still need tending so now, I can move toward healing. Were it not for these moments, I’d still be pushing aside little annoyances and snide comments every time the ex’s name was mentioned. Were it not for moments like these, I’d be walking around with bitterness in my heart unable to move forward. Once light is shined in darkness, the dim is forced to yield to the brightness! That is so comforting to me. I can rest confidently knowing that God is faithful and just to complete the work He began in my heart long ago and bring me to a place of true freedom. When the tears and fears are squeezed to surface, his living water can come in and refresh my soul.

Thank you Lord for every ache, every pain and every tear as long as they draw me nearer to you!

 

Forgiveness

/ Jaimie / Leave a comment

Bound

Anyone who has been a Christian for any amount of time knows a thing or two about forgiveness. First, there’s the fact that we’ve been forgiven so much, a concept that still blows my mind when I think of some of the things I’ve done or worse yet, acknowledge the things my heart was capable of doing. Then at some point, we dig a little deeper and find the skeletons of long ago that still cause our hearts to grieve and/or our blood to boil to the point of seething and we slowly start letting go of them. We clean out the baggage that takes up much needed space in the closets of our hearts.

We find that forgiveness comes easy in some situations and much harder in others. I can vividly remember a particular situation that I went through where I found myself coming repeatedly to the Lord and crying out for help because I wanted to forgive and said I’d forgiven but I knew in my heart I wasn’t over it yet. Some wounds are deeper than others. I would leave my prayer closet thinking I had overcome only to find myself fuming and my stomach churning the next time someone mentioned the offender’s name.

The beauty of such a long hard battle is that when the victory comes, it somehow seems sweeter. My victory in this situation was actually subtle. After years of prayer and struggle, I ran into said person at a store one day. I say “ran into” but the truth is I walked by and noticed someone hiding behind a fruit display in the produce department. This person apparently spotted me first. That struck me as so funny that I figured I’d go be pleasant and eliminate the need of any future fruit cover up.

I was standing there in the produce department having a conversation with someone who hurt and abused me, someone who threatened the life of me and my daughter, someone who had held the weight of my wrath for so long, as if we were old friends catching up. I realized in that moment that it no longer hurt. I was no longer angry. I had obtained my freedom without really knowing it until confronted with it. There were no lightning bolts from heaven signifying the end of an era. I didn’t need to ‘hug it out’ or have any real sense of closure on the situation. It was simply done. Hidden and absorbed with the blood spilled to free me in an old cross, and purged by peace into life.

I’ve found myself being confronted with this passage of scripture several times recently,

 “Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you,leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” Matthew 5:23-24

What people often overlook in these verses is that Jesus said if someone has something against you, not the other way around. Obviously, we know if we have something against someone else, we need to go make it right, but Jesus raises the standard. He doesn’t want us to allow strife at all. We are required to make an effort even when it’s someone else holding the offense against us. This, in my opinion, is a tough one.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who was adamantly refusing to make an effort to make peace with a person because they were convinced that was they said was right. My counsel to them was that it doesn’t matter if you are right, you don’t have to say you were wrong, but you are required to try to mend the relationship between you and your brother. God doesn’t tolerate strife, period.

We often allow our own pride and defensiveness drive our actions. I believe that though we never compromise on what we believe, we don’t always have to fight for ourselves. God will defend the righteous. That is His job. Our job, according to Micah 6:8 is this, “And what does the Lord require of you, But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?”

There are times when we will extend the olive branch of peace to another person and that person is not willing to accept it. I believe in those situations all we can do is pray for them and continue to walk in love toward them. God knows our hearts and will not hold the actions and attitudes of another against us. Please don’t take the effort to mend a relationship to an unhealthy extreme. I have seen people who become almost obsessed with trying to make someone forgive them or like them. You are only responsible for what you do. If someone else refuses to forgive, let it go. It’s between them and God.

When we choose not to forgive someone else we are binding that person to our hearts. I refuse to allow those who have wronged me to continue to have any effect on my life. I am determined to free myself of them and any chain they have in me. So I forgive quickly. When it’s hard I pray for them even through clinched teeth when necessary, until the chain is broken.

Forgiveness is one of the most freeing things we as mortals are given the pleasure of experiencing. I am so thankful for the forgiveness and grace extended to me by my Savior, Jesus Christ. I am so thankful for the people who love and bear with me daily as I make my way through this earthly existence. I am so thankful that I am given the opportunity to release the chains that bind my heart when I hold an offense against another person. We are blessed.

 

Hurricane Isaac

/ Jaimie / 3 Comments

Hurricane Isaac 5pm updated track from NOAA website

We’re busy getting ready for Hurricane Isaac. We’re hoping it will be no more than a few thunderstorms (a phenomenon we in south Florida are quite comfortable with) but with each new advisory, we are realizing we should feel the force of a category 1 storm. Naples is officially under a hurricane warning so, as happens every time, panic is spreading around our little corner of the world. Gas stations, grocery stores and Home Depot are thriving. Facebook is blowing up with Isaac information.

I too have gotten the bug. I found myself compelled to turn the TV channel from Food Network to The Weather Channel to watch the latest advisory.

My daugter and nephew are out back keeping guard over the fire pit. We’ve been diligently piling all of our flammable disposables i.e. old furniture, boxes from our move in May, leftover wood from my husbands jobsites. The hope was that when it wasn’t 100 degrees outside we could use these items to make our fire pit into an entertaining winter evening activity. Now we realize what we’ve really created is a large pile of soon to be projectiles. They must go.

I’m taking inventory of what I can cook without electricity in hopes of saving myself a trip to town tonight (It’s not looking good). I’m catching up on laundry  so we’ll have clean clothes to wear with or without power and water. We have flashlights, candles, battery-powered radios and batteries to go with them.

My extended family is trying to decide whose house is safest to ride out the action so we know who gets to stay home and who spends the night here or where. Which makes me think I’ll probably need more food because we’ll probably have company. It’s an adventure after all. Why have an adventure alone?

If only we had time to prepare for all of the catastrophes life throws at us. Then again, maybe we do… We may not get storm warnings and advanced notice for all of life’s happenings, but we do have the ability to prepare for things ahead of time. We start by having our focus on the right things everyday.

If we prepare our hearts, when the storms of life arise all the clutter is already cleared away. The things that can cause damage to our spirits can be taken care of daily so when tragedy comes, we don’t have to break or crumble.  Spiritual preparedness comes first and foremost from the only truly safe refuge of the soul, Jesus Christ.

Here are a few steps we can take to prepare ourselves:

1. Guard your heart: Proverbs 4:23 “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life”

Philippians 4:7 “and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

It’s like putting up hurricane shutters to keep the rubble away.

2. Forgive: Luke 6:37 “Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.

When we forgive others it’s like cleaning up our hearts. When we hold onto anger and unforgiveness, we hurt only ourselves. We need to clean it all out so it can’t hurt us any longer. The best part is that we are forgiven as well.

3. Reading the word of God: Psalm 119:11 “Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You.”

By reading the word of God, we are storing up food and water for when we need it. If we hide His word in our heart, we can draw from that foundation when times get tough. We can remember and rely on God’s promises no matter what the circumstances may be.

God has given us all we need to prepare for life’s storms. It’s our job to use those tools to walk through them and come out conquerors.

1 Peter 1:3 “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue”