My face goes slack, and my eyes glaze over as I try to make my face as emotionless as possible. As I climb up my glass tower, I already wear a full suit of armor. The moat has been drawn, and the drawbridge sits sturdily against my fortified walls. Inside my castle I can see beyond the western hills, hear the rustle of the last leaves of fall as they crinkle in the breeze, my muscles tense and the hair on my neck on end. Waiting for the fall. Ready for disaster. Then out in the distance, I see it. Digging my heels into the ground and lowering my helmet so that not even my eyes can be seen, I brace for impact.
Forgiveness rears its ugly head, glowering with eyes like fire and smoke trailing out its nostrils like an all-consuming cloud. It curls its lips, and in its mouth, I see fangs and an infinite darkness spiraling down, down, down. With a single breath, fire streams out its mouth as if trying to melt the walls I’ve so carefully built up and around. It wouldn’t take much for it to burn the armor I have encased myself in, so I steer clear of the flames spilling out of its mouth, running and ducking out of its way as I harden my face and start planning ways to repair my walls. Perhaps they need to be bigger.
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People don’t really tell you what to do when others have hurt you. Forgive and forget. Live and learn. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Yiddah yaddah yoddah. The platitudes go on and on, as hallow and meaningless as it is when people tell you to “calm down” when you’re Mount Vesuvius on the city of Pompeii.
And no one really told me that paper cuts could hurt so bad. The reason paper cuts are so painful are because they slice through those nerve endings right at the tips of your fingers, sending pain signals straight to your brain for a cut thinner and shallower than a piece of hair.
Ghosted text messages and missed meetings sliced. Empty prayers and what seemed like complete ambivalence cut over and over again. Weeks turned into months, turned faithfully into years as pain signals shot up. I left my church community because after bearing out my soul, I couldn't put everything that fell out of me back in, and it seemed like no one cared. I grew angry and frustrated when it seemed like people who wanted to call themselves my family didn't want to support me, and those actions-- and the lack thereof-- spoke louder than words. So how did I respond? I ran.
Every week it became easier to choose out of community and into something else, and I found I could save a lot of time and emotional energy by not reaching out anymore to people who said they cared but would only disappoint. I wanted space, not confrontation, and the distance made everything—expectations and all—duller.
Forgive and forget? Might as well forget to forgive and be done with it. Wipe my hands of it. Turn the wheel and set my rudder in a new direction. Build up an ivory tower for myself where not a soul but myself can live. Make new friends but keep them at arms’ length. Defenses up and expectations lowered, like just enough shots of Hennessey or cheap alcohol to make laughter a little easier and the world a little warmer and fuzzier.*
Two years were enough for me, so I’ve used my hurt to build walls and construct a full suit of armor—a reminder of lines never to be crossed again, a weight I can’t shake, and a rationalization for the need to be impenetrable.
But God’s response to decades, generations, centuries of betrayal and disappointed expectations? Of generations of Israelites blatantly disrespecting God by continually turning to other gods? When King David, supposedly a “man after God’s own heart”, got a woman pregnant and murdered her husband to cover it up? And when king after king ignored God and the kingdom spiraled further and further out of control?
What did he do? He entrusted his most prized possession to a teen bride, only for his son to start life in one of the most unhygienic places thinkable, and then to spend spend his first few years as a probably undernourished refugee. God would watch as his son—the apple of his eye, his right hand man, the one whom he loves, part of the great I AM and creator of the universe—struggled with puberty and live without indoor plumbing. And all humor aside, I can only imagine the pain God felt as his son was called a bastard and spat upon.
And for Jesus to actually go through all of those things when he knew he was God incarnate?** Standing in front of Pontius Pilate and withstanding the accusations of the Pharisees and Sadducees, how eager I would have been to deny anything and everything to save my neck. As people mock and guards flog, bitterness and anger would have risen so quickly to my throat. And left out to dry on one of the most painful torture devices in history, seeing my best friends, my mother, my whole family just watching from a distance, would I have enough energy to shout at them—or at the very least stare daggers at them—and ask why they weren’t doing anything? Why they didn’t stick up for me any sooner, as I tell myself I would do for them?
Somehow, thankfully, my responses aren’t what Jesus did, and they weren’t God’s first response to a recalcitrant people. Instead Jesus chose into the lives of the dirty, the diseased, the lame, the poor, and God chose unlikely and unqualified heroes—aka the people known to disappoint. Jesus developed and devoted time and emotion to 12 people for three years straight, only to be betrayed. And after proving himself time and time again, they still lost faith in him and were quick to abandon him and go into hiding.
Why live through years of betrayal and missed expectations and hurt when you’re literally the king of the universe and have enough power in your pinky finger to smite down whatever and whomever you want?
Because of us. Us, in our stubbornness and mockery and deceit. Somehow God couldn’t bear the thought of heaven without us, so he brought heaven down and gave us a place as sons and daughters. We murdered his beloved son, and in return he gave us keys to the kingdom. We’ve messed up, ignored him, intentionally tried to put him, in his infinitude, into a box we can push to the back of the closet and bring out for the holidays. We rub the lamp and expect him to appear at our beck and call, only to put him back on a shelf.
It’s true. People don’t really tell you what to do when people have hurt you. But God shows us. Through him, we can see that forgiveness looks like washing the feet of the men who would deny knowing you, or pleading on behalf of the mocking crowd below. Forgiveness is a word spelled through love for those who have left, grace to those who have hurt, and faith that those people can change.
"Forgiveness is a word spelled through love for those who have left, grace to those who have hurt, and faith that those people can change"
Now, I don’t want to advocate for diving headfirst back into the communities and the lives of people that made you sick. Forgiveness need not be equivalent to stupidity. Steer clear of toxic people and prioritize selfcare. But I also want to caution you in thinking that avoidance and building higher, thinker walls is selfcare. In my case, bitterness filled whatever space I had given myself and made my heart hard. While I thought I was crying out to God, God was already reaching down to me, and I was swatting his hand away.
At the heart of it, I doubted that God loved me because I couldn’t “feel” him in the communities I was part of or in some of the relationships closest to me. And by failing to recognize how supreme and expansive God’s love for me is, I let myself inch further and further away from his lessons of love and forgiveness. In their absence, I transformed them into unconquerable beasts with too many watching eyes and convinced myself I was better off without them-- that I could be safe behind my walls and in my carefully constructed shell.
But God so loved a broken world that he forgave it. He didn’t just forgive the people he thought would change, and he didn’t draft the most pious into his team. Indiscriminately, he poured his whole self out onto us so that we could know love and spend more time with him, because at the end of the day, he doesn’t want what we can give him or a resume of why we’re worthy to be called his; he wasn’t us.
How else can we respond to a love like that but in awe and wonder?
*Okay, let’s hold the phone for a hot second here. I’ve written pretty depressing stuff so far, and exaggeration it may be, but the truth is still laced in there. However, I don’t want to throw the new friends I’ve made the past two years under the bus. From dancing to chilling in my room, and everything in between, some of my favorite college memories are with these people. They’ve provided the reprieve I needed, the laughter I so sought out, after having a time and a half. They’ve been medicine I’ve wanted and needed to take to take the edge off a bit, and in many ways they’ve sobered me up to the fact that life doesn’t have to be serious all the time and that not everyone needs to know everything.
I continue to choose into these friendships not because I want to get drunk of them—and I definitely don’t want to imply that in my alcohol analogy—but because relationships take time, and when the occasion arises for me to be a support or to be supported, I know that they’ll be there. From experience, going too fast into the deep end is a recipe for disaster.
** the Trinity is weird, dude, let me tell you. Can’t explain it even if I fully understood it.