“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” Colossians 3:13
I was upset. A friend I’d known for many years said something incredibly hurtful. Immediately we became involved in a heated discussion and the both of us began making a scene in front of others. Feeling embarrassed, I stopped talking and gave him the last word before walking away.
But my anger followed.
As soon as I got home that afternoon, I sat down at my computer desk and began typing out a scathing email to my soon-to-be ex-friend. This was going to be the mother of all emails! I’ll show him. He thinks he got the last word? He’s got another thing coming! How dare him to humiliate me like that in front of others! I’ll show him!
The words came to me like a flowing river. I had an evil grin on my face as every word I angrily typed was punctuated with a loud strike on my keyboard. The nerve of this guy. The nerve! As I continued typing everything I wanted to say to him an hour earlier but didn’t, I went back and reread my work. Clearly there aren’t enough expletives. Let me take care of that now.
Had my mother been looking over my shoulder and reading along, she would’ve completely disowned me! But I didn’t care. This man would never again speak to me, which was exactly what I wanted.
And… precisely what Satan wanted, too.
Suddenly there was a knock on my door. One of my neighbors needed a hand doing something. So I saved the email into a draft and went to help him. Then I remembered I needed to pick something up from the store. And then shortly after that, there was another errand I had forgotten about.
By the time I got back home, it was getting late in the evening. I decided to finish the email the following morning.
The short of a long story… I got up the next morning and grabbed my coffee. I sat down to check my email, completely forgetting about the email draft that I started the day before. I pulled up the draft and read it. And then I read it again. And then I read it again.
And then….. I deleted it.
It would be a couple years before I would see this guy again. A mutual friend of ours had passed away. As I sat in the church pew waiting for the funeral service to start that day, he came up and tapped me on the shoulder. “Mind if I sit beside you?” he asked. “Help yourself,” I replied. We made small talk about our friend, some of the memorable times we all shared as we sat there and waited for the service to start. And then, from out of nowhere, he apologized to me for what had happened that day a few years earlier. He explained that he was going through a very dark time in his life when we got into our argument that day. He briefly touched on a few things that he had been going through. “But none of that gave me the right to treat you the way I treated you that day. I have thought about that day quite a lot since then. I am so, so sorry. Can you forgive me”
We shook hands and hugged. Forgive and forget. That’s what real friends do.
As I drove home from the funeral, I thought about just how different things might’ve played out had I finished that email and sent it to my friend a few years earlier. But even in my most irrational moment, God knew this moment would come. Even though I had not prayed about it and asked Him to intervene, He did just that. He sent an angel in the form of a neighbor who needed my help with something, not once personally realizing that I was the one who needed the help. God blessed me with a distraction that afternoon. And that distraction led to several others, all of which took me off the path of destruction that I was on and sent me off in an entirely different direction.
God knew that I was angry. He knew that I was about to throw away a friendship over something completely insignificant. And he knew that me and my friend would connect again just a few years later, at the perfect time and place to restore a broken friendship. The Lord taught me an important lesson about grace that day; one that I will never forget.
Friend, our reactions and responses matter. They matter to those around us, but most importantly they matter to God.
For in Matthew 22:37-40, we read Jesus’ own words: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Who in your life today needs your forgiveness? I encourage you to pray to our Heavenly Father and ask Him to intervene. Ask Him to give you an opportunity to forgive, and to guide your heart and your words. You may say, “But you don’t understand. This person has hurt me so many, many times. How many times must I forgive him? A great question deserves the greatest answer:
As many times as the Lord has forgiven you.
Former Blackout Artist 