Life Lines
“as we forgive our debtors”
This year’s Journey Program from General Church Outreach is Practicing
Forgiveness, prepared by Sasha Silverman and the Rev. John Odhner. The steps
of the six-week program discuss how difficult forgiveness can be but how
essential it is for our spiritual growth and regeneration. (See an article on the
Journey Program, page 324.)
We pray each day to “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” But
it is easy to feel that people who have wronged us do not deserve forgiveness
– that they must apologize, show remorse, seek forgiveness first. But such
instincts focus on self, rather than what the Lord wants and expects of us.
The booklet for this Journey Program includes this quote: “Since the end
of World War II, I had a home in Holland for the victims of Nazi brutality.
Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were also able to return
to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars.
Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and
horrible as that.” (Corrie ten Boom, survivor of the Jewish Holocaust)
Many of us remember with abject horror the day a man walked into a
one-room Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania in 2006 and shot to
death 10 young girls. (It was similar to the wanton carnage in a Sandy Hook,
Connecticut, elementary school in 2012 where 20 young children and six
adults were killed by a lone gunman.) The instinct – the very first instinct – of
the Amish parents was to forgive the man who committed this atrocity on
their innocent children. Their lives were shattered but grace and forgiveness
were essential to living their faith.
One of my favorite books is Man’s Search for Meaning by Holocaust
survivor Viktor Frankl. Through those apparently endless and hopeless days
in Auschwitz he observed that those who found some meaning in their lives
survived while those who did not and gave up hope often died quickly. He also
discovered that the last freedom we lose – when all freedom is stripped away
– is choosing our attitude: how we deal with what confronts us. And that no
matter how much we may be deprived of personal freedom, we never lose our
spiritual freedom.
At one point he quotes Dostoyevsky: “There is only one thing I dread:
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