My friend continues to struggle with her husband’s one-time-only infidelity even though the adulterous situation happened a few years ago. From the outside looking in, it appears to me that she expects her husband to forever be in a state of repentance. Many of us go through situations where we put a price on forgiveness and we want the offending party to earn their way back into our good graces. The question then becomes, at what point do we mark it Paid in Full? The other day a quote caught my ear, “Forgiveness isn’t earned…it’s given.” And that’s what Christ does for us, over and over again.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----If it were only that simple. The truth about the human soul is that as the future becomes the present, memories of the past mix in. The Bible says God places our sins as far from Him as the East is from the West, and He will remember them no more. I don’t know how He does it, because He knows each of our thoughts. Every one of us remembers from time to time not only our own sins but also those of the ones we love. So from time to time He must be faced with our own recollections. Maybe He deletes them as instantly from His thought as they occur to ours.
-----But can we do that too, truly? In the first place, our condition of being physically separated from God into this universe of corruption and decay does not by nature lend us the ability. Our memories come from the physical makeup of our brains. At the very least, their presentation to the consciousness is unavoidable. And usually when they are presented they go one step or beyond into lingering. The more hurtful was the event, the more apt it is to re-emerge in certain circumstances, and the stickier will be the lingering. Hence, we hear some people talk about how forgiveness must be ongoing. The forgiven event leaves trailing effects.
-----Forgiveness must also deal with them. The most part of love is commitment. The deeper love digs into our relationships, and the message of the Bible is that we are not to build a floor against its depth for anyone, the deeper commitment must permeate our dealings, both mental and physical. I believe marriage is the most important and beautiful of all relationships God made between people. It forms a perpetual anecdote for shaping all other relationships, especially the one with God. Commitment to the spouse’s actual well being is its first priority. That commitment regarding a situation must move as deep into the soul as the spouse perceives it. Otherwise love truly ends where the commitment ends. When an affair has become a situation, then both spouses gain a commitment to deal responsibly with its memories regardless of forgiveness. For it will certainly be remembered from time to time.
-----No one is perfect. If one souse has an inability in some circumstance, then it is necessary for the other to step up to the plate and help out. I recon your friend’s values and attitudes towards marriage were vast and interlaced. Their interconnections were probably deep and fragile, making the whole mix within her soul large and vulnerable. But cutting from the useless psycho-analysis, it becomes up to her husband to begin serving her some tasty tidbits of basic trust at those depths of meaning where her feelings are yet captured by his breach. If love has any floor, it is required here at this depth, not as a barrier, but as a foundation for her to build upon. Its necessity is not because she deserves it, or is entitled to it, or any other form of justification other than that she simply needs it. For she is kind of trapped by error of her own within an after effect, which now causes some need for forgiveness on his part. Since effects are not simple, forgiveness needs to simply grow in a situation like yeast until healing has replaced the need for floors when the after effects have become laced into all the natural structure of love.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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