No longer stuck on replay

Jenny Sawyer | from the Christian Science Sentinel

God provides the love that heals broken relationships.

I was supposed to be working, but all I could think about was fifth grade.

We’ve all been there at one point or another. I don’t mean steeped in memories of elementary school, but rather, stuck on replay—reliving a moment when we’ve been wronged, or hurt, or betrayed by someone else.

For me, it was fifth grade and the cruelty of one particular girl. I’ll call her Kelly. Sure, I hadn’t thought of her in years. But thanks to the world of social networking, she’d suddenly popped up again. Along with most of the rest of my fifth-grade class.

At first, it had been fun to catch up. To see the grown-up versions of the kids I’d known as spelling-bee rivals and slumber-party pals. But then everyone started reminiscing, and all the awful things Kelly had done came shooting to the surface after years of dormancy: Fake rumors. The way she’d tried to turn two friends against me. Cruelty that, frankly, still hurt.

The fact that Kelly’s unkindness could bother me so many years later probably seems ridiculous. It felt that way to me, too. But I was also feeling self-righteous in my hurt. Kelly’s behavior seemed unforgivable.

Jesus made revolutionary demands on his followers in the forgiveness department.

In the past, when I’ve had trouble forgiving, I’ve turned to Jesus’ life and teachings to get me on the right path. He made revolutionary demands on his followers in the forgiveness department, telling them that a halfhearted approach to loving their enemies wasn’t going to cut it. For example, when Peter suggested that forgiving seven times might be adequate, Jesus replied, “I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:22).

The problem was, I was so busy thinking about Kelly’s seventy times seven offenses—and reliving those offenses at least that many times—that forgiveness just seemed like too much to ask.

Still, I was trying. And one day, in my prayers, a question occurred to me. It was: What’s the why behind the “seventy times seven”? In other words, Jesus wouldn’t have taught this kind of radical love unless something, some power higher than our own best human efforts, made that love possible. And that higher power, of course, is God.

In that moment of prayer, I saw something that dramatically shifted my approach to human relationships. This isn’t to say that God hadn’t played a large, even central, role in the way I’d related to others before. But I guess God used to come second. I’d always thought of relationships as the other person and me—and then God. As though I needed to draw God into the relationship from the outside in order to set things right.

Instead, I realized, the God-and-me relationship was it. All-important. This was about God and His idea, Love and its likeness. It was about one indestructible relationship.

There hadn’t been some period in my life when Love had been absent.

And it was also about my willingness to admit that my relationship with divine Love had always been intact, and that there hadn’t been some period in my life when Love had been absent (leaving me at the mercy of some other power). I even began to admit this for Kelly. After all, where in a universe governed by Love was there room for a victim or a victimizer?

Through my prayers, I was coming to see that purifying our relationships isn’t so much about how good we are at forgiving, but about how committed we are to honoring our own (and others’) relationships with God.

It’s also about how willing we are to stand up to the aggressive suggestions that repeatedly try to convince us that something could come between Creator and created, between Love and its manifestation. As I saw in my struggle with my memories of Kelly, these suggestions can be very convincing. They argue that we’ve been hurt or wronged, and that we’ll have to live with those feelings for much longer than just the moment in which they occurred. But isn’t this the same as saying that God could be impotent or neglectful—two qualities that could never be associated with a God who is infinite Love itself?

What got me off replay with Kelly was when I realized that I wasn’t willing to believe in a mercurial, forgetful God—not for me or anyone. Instead, I wanted to be faithful in my love for God because I was seeing how faithful Love is to all of its ideas.

That ugly old history? It’s as though it never happened.

It was Love that healed me of the hurt and transformed my view of my fifth-grade peer. That ugly old history? It’s as though it never happened. Before the healing, I probably could have related the specifics of two dozen of Kelly’s offenses. Now, I literally can remember vague details of only one. It’s like even that experience has been completely erased.

Which makes me think that divine Love must be transforming all of our relationships by affirming its unwavering care for each of us, no matter whom we meet or how they behave. And this means we can let go of hurt for a more tangible sense of Love’s presence. Before the replay even begins.