Everyone Can Be a Jerk... how forgiveness opens healing and resilience

          I’ve been learning a lot about forgiveness recently.  It’s one of the active ingredients of resilience, that gift of healing that God has built into us.  One of the things I’ve learned is that we can fight against resilience by not releasing the power of forgiveness.

          Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Forgiveness is not an occasional act.  It is a constant attitude.”  The truth of this insight rests in seeing resilience triggered inherently when forgiveness is the atmosphere of our emotions.  Essentially, this suggests that we should go through life assured that everyone can be a jerk, and, knowing, we’re part of “everyone.”

          The constant attitude is the hard part, right?

It must start each day.  We must consciously release it as we begin our morning, like opening the blinds of our windows to the light, that we shut last night against the darkness.  If we keep the blinds shut as the day begins and progresses, we keep our homes cooler and darker.  That can happen with our hearts, too.

          We have to open up to the light daily and let it fill the atmosphere our souls.  When we do that our resilience has the juice to be reflexive.  It kicks in more readily when someone has decided to be the jerk that day.  If we start with it we’re ready.

          C. S. Lewis wrote… “It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.”

          I recognize now that some of my “wishes and hopes” are for retribution to come crashing down on that jerk!  I am looking for justice… as least justice that satisfies my wants and diminishes the worth of the one who attacked me. I want them to feel my pain.

As that wild animal of judgment rushes at me, I find myself wrestling with it, rather than shoving it back.  Wrestling is an act of embracing with an intention of dominating as if I’m strong enough to handle it, even tame it.  Instead of shoving it back so that it isn’t a part of my life, I expect I can deal with it well. But that “other voice” is telling me to shove the animal back.  The voice says, “I will handle appropriate retribution. Trust that (in fact) ‘Vengeance is mine.’ You just get on with living because you were made to heal and to enjoy the day.”

          Eva Kor, who died on July 4, 2019, brought such a demand for recognition of her anger toward what the Nazis did to her and countless others, that when she shifted to forgiveness, other people couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t follow her into forgiveness, because her shift exposed their own unresolved indignation. But she discovered that healing was stronger.  “Getting even has never healed a single person,” she said.

          When I consider the depth of her forgiveness, the darkness she had to shove back from her life, and when I think of King developing a constant attitude of forgiveness toward the damage done to him daily, it makes me open the blinds of my soul’s windows to let in the morning light of healing.