It is slow and painful but goes unnoticed and has a numbing effect that renders your senses useless. I don’t mean to say that you can’t feel every nick and slit but somehow you are able to reason your way through each cutting interaction or memory and justify by context, commitment or otherwise. Why do we justify? I think it is because we don’t know how to feel because we have at times come to hate yourselves.
Now that sounds overstated but I am not so sure is. A paper cut is the very everyday kind of wound that slowly but surely kills us. It robs us of life because we let it. We choose to allow the words the criticisms the jokes and silence to work into our skin until we wear our woundness. Others have pointed out that forgiving the other is foundational and those who learn the beautiful practice of forgiveness will be healed in that very action. Their set free in a sense from their hatred of the other with new energy to love with healthy boundaries. They are set free to love well, a way that refuses hatred toward themselves or others by honoring both.
I think the ethic of loving the enemy, anger being hatred, and forgiving debtors is rooted in the same idea. In a cyclical fluid movement forgiveness sets me free as I release my own captives. God’s forgiveness is experienced and known in the participation of ourselves-our very lives and everyday transactions are in a sense entrusted to God as we forgive. Our love our hatred our very posture in this life is shifted when we forgive and forgive well. We give our trust over to the hope of a love that is strong enough to breathe life without our manmade manipulations. It is a love that Scott Peck called true love because it had past through psuedo and chaotic expressions and landed someplace honest.
I want to forgive and be forgiven. I want to love and know love. And I want to love (to know) myself enough to walk toward a person God is making with boundaries and limits. On the trail I remember saying to a friend that I felt as if I could tell my body to walk any distance and it would do it. I believed I could keep going without any consequence. I remember walking 50 miles one day and I limped for weeks. I haven’t walk that far since and I don’t intent to not because it wasn’t fun or the wildest day to date but because it wasn’t sustainable. I intent to do this life thing forever. And fifty mile days are only days you walk when you are scared to life forever. And Jesus tells me to not be afraid, to trust, to walk, to have life-life to the full.
