For the last six months, pursuing forgiveness to bring healing into my life - particularly in a Christian way - has been a big focus of mine. It revolves around a specific situation that I am not at liberty speak of in detail.
Today I thought I had made a small step toward not just forgiveness but reconciliation in this situation, only to find later that my future actions were already pre-judged to turn out the same as my past actions despite active attempts made on my part in the last six months in a variety of ways (counseling, training, reading books) to explore potentially better ways to handle the same situations.
It's days like today I need to remind myself of parables, some of the strongest uses of creative words to make points about biblical truth. Though told orally to the crowds, they were also transcribed for future generations.
Today my thoughts turned to the parable of the unmerciful servant (see Matthew 18), where Peter asks Jesus how many times to forgive his brother - "Jesus answered, 'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.'" (Matthew 18:22, NIV).
He then goes on in Matthew 18 to illustrate the point by telling the story of how one servant who owed money begged his master to be patient with him, then turned around and tried by force to get the money out of another man who owed him. When the fellow servant refuses, he is punished by being thrown in prison and the other servants tell the master. The master punishes the servant for not having mercy and turns him over the jailors for torture until he pays back what he owes. The point is that God wants each of us to forgive from our hearts with mercy repeatedly, or God will not be happy with us, just like the misbehaving servant.
It's written better in the Bible, and I encourage you to read it there. I don't want to be so creative as to trump a well-written parable.
As to myself, what I have to keep reminding myself is that it is important to work on forgiving over and over, even if reconciliation never happens. It is possible to forgive without reconciliation. Forgiveness is understanding the issue but not necessarily condoning the action, but the latter concept of reconciliation is trying to bring things back together. That is why it is possible to forgive multiple times over... but you're not required to forget. In fact, if we forget, we can't learn from past mistakes. That's what I believe anyway.
I'm not so sure God has reconciliation on the horizon for me on this one, but the hard part is keeping faith while managing expectations. A tough thing to juggle.
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