I’ve always thought I was really good at forgiveness. I’ve thanked God often for giving me a gift for forgiving. But I’m starting to think I’m only good at forgiving the little things If it really hurt and it was from someone I have strong feelings about, I might not be so good.
I was pondering this during my morning prayers and was reminded about something I read the book The Love Dare. Not sure where in the book, but one of the chapters puts forth the idea that we all have 2 rooms for the people in our lives. One room is where we hang reminders of the bad times with a person, and the other are reminders good times. We all put our memories in one of these two rooms. Our choice in the matter, is which room we spend our time in. Do we spend our time wandering around in the room of pain, or the room of joy? We have that choice and how we choose determines how we feel about someone.
I was thinking about this and forgiveness and the situation I was wrestling with and had a very graphic daydream.
I was in someone’s pain room and I had a paper on which was written what they had said. I looked around the room and the walls were covered with these papers. I walked over to the wall and there was a spot, almost as if it had been reserved ahead of time, where this paper fit and a push-pin waiting which I used to hang the paper on the wall. I turned away from the wall, and there in front of me was the cross of my Lord. Not a clean cross. It was a bloody scene right out of the movie “The Passion Of Christ”. Beside the cross, thrust into the floor of the room, was a spear. I knew just what I had to do, and I shuddered.
I reached out and grabbed the spear in my hands and looked at the corpse of my Lord Jesus on the cross. I thrust the spear into his side, as my sins had done so often before. The blood flowed out of his body. I cupped my hands and caught some of the blood and then threw it on the walls covered with papers. As I started to weep I cupped my hands again and again, throwing the blood on the papers with almost hysterical energy.
Suddenly I looked around and every paper on every wall was destroyed by the blood. The room looked like a scene from “Helter Skelter”, except for the cross, but it didn’t feel like “Helter Skelter”. I was at peace. I knew what it all meant.
I walked over to the door to leave the room. When I reached for the doorknob I saw my hand covered with blood. I left the room and pulled the door closed behind me and realized my hands had just covered the doorknob with blood. There was a mirror on the door. I looked and my eyes were swollen from crying, and I was covered in the blood of my Lord Jesus.
I sighed, smiled, and whispered “Thank-you Lord”. I looked down the hall and saw a few more doors that still had clean doorknobs and knew I may be at this for a while. I looked at the names on the doors and they were all people I loved so much. And there at the end of the hall was a door with my own name on it.
Jesus died a radical death so I could be forgiven for my radical sins and learn to practice radical forgiveness.
By the way, the good memories rooms were everywhere too….and they all had bloody doorknobs.
