One recent morning, moving through my daily work routine, the phone rang. In conditioned fashion, I answered. The voice on the other end seemed insistent without explanation. Knowing there was a protocol to his request, I reacted to his attitude with a cold, mustered professionalism. Moments later, at my request to the caller, a third party, a friend, called on his behalf. With my friend, I expressed my frustration.
When patience, forbearance, and charity should have prevailed, I bristled with a momentary terseness, reacting to an attitude, a personality I perceived as too assuming and forward. My fit caused me to utter the word “idiot” describing the caller to my friend. I immediately realized my fault. I had no other reason to be angry other than my distaste for the caller’s assumption. I thought, “why didn’t he know better?”
In reflection, why didn’t I know better?
After apologizing to my friend by text over my failing, I stewed over this encounter for the rest of the morning until my friend texted his response offering his agreement and forgiveness. I felt immediate relief from my mistake.
And then, it occurred to me. His forgiveness and understanding was tangible. I could hear the sincerity in his tone. My asking, my seeking atonement, and his response, assured me in a way I could not assure myself. Forgiveness is not an entry into reconciliation, but the receiving of it. I could not be reconciled until I heard my friend’s words. I wondered. Have we, in earnest, received God’s forgiveness? Have we heard His words? Oh, not by the mind but by the heart have we received?
Too easy do we say “yes” to the question because this is what we have heard and been told our whole Christian life. I think the answer is much harder. Impulse ruled my lesser moment.
The hard work of reconciliation begins in forgiveness— yes, the asking—but much more the receiving. Only then can love win. Only then, when hearts appeal to hearts in sincerity and truth, do we discover between the asking and receiving, God’s meaning, His grace.
George MacDonald wrote, “He that is made in the image of God must know Him or be desolate. Witness the dissatisfaction, yea, desolation of my soul—wretched, alone, unfinished, without Him. It cannot act from itself, save in God; acting from what seems itself without God, is no action at all, it is a mere yielding to impulse. All within is disorder and spasm. There is a cry behind me, and a voice before; instincts of betterment tell me I must rise above my present self: I see not how to obey, how to carry them out!”
I cannot see God. I cannot touch Him. But through the asking and receiving of forgiveness, I am seen by Him, touched by Him and I know Him, know Him to be truth. And when my lesser moment reveals there is but desolation left in me, forgiveness turns my soul toward Him again, toward my betterment through Him.