God and Sinners Reconciled

Yesterday I sort of cut someone off while driving. I didn’t mean to do it. I was stuck in the middle lane when I needed to turn left, so I waited until there was a gap in the left turn lane’s line and just went for it. There was plenty of room. No one had to slam on their brakes or anything. But the guy behind me was not pleased, and boy did he let me know! He honked and wildly gesticulated, enthusiastically working to elicit complete and thorough repentance on my part. I sheepishly waved an apology at him and attempted to avoid further eye contact, choosing instead to engage my toddler in the back seat with joyful Christmas music as we oohed and ahhed over all the festive decorations in downtown Coeur d’ Alene.

I didn’t think much more of it until about five minutes later when the offended party suddenly (and quite aggressively) laid on his horn once more for good measure before turning onto a side street and disappearing from view— a parting “F you” to remind me that I needed to remain sufficiently ashamed of my poor driving choices for the remainder of the day.

I’ve evolved at least slightly as a human in the past few years. When we were first married, Daniel had to roll up my window to prevent me from displaying my tall finger to hostile drivers. My fight-or-flight instincts can be best described as full pufferfish; if I feel threatened, my default is to puff up and throw down. (Foolishness and courage are not always mutually exclusive.) My patient husband has worked to help me temper some of that adrenaline and funnel it into less dangerous responses. Holy Spirit conviction and motherhood hasn’t hurt my progress either. You can’t exactly afford to go taking unnecessary risks with psychotic people when you’ve got a 3-year-old in tow.

So this time, instead of getting angry, I just thought to myself how deeply pathetic and sad it must be to live one’s life with that fragile of an ego and that sensitive a trigger. The only one suffering in this equation was him. By the time he reminded me of my error, I was already blissfully onto the “ten lords a leaping” in my Christmas music extravaganza. I was pointing out twinkle lights and telling my kiddo about the baby Jesus in a manger, but this poor guy was still locked in a furious endorphin rush that would likely spill over onto the rest of his interactions for the remainder of the day. His reaction did not match the crime, and now the situation was controlling him instead of the other way around.

I could sit here and patronizingly judge him if I really wanted to, but if I get super honest, on my rougher days, I’m not all that much different than this guy. That’s really the nature of anger and unforgiveness, even when we can rationally argue that people sincerely deserve it. If we let it go too long, it ends up controlling us and taking over the driver’s seat in all kinds of situations without our ever realizing it. Unforgiveness locks us up and ends up punishing us more than anyone else. As Anne Lamott put it, “Harboring unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and expecting the rat to die.”

She’s not wrong.

What’s also crazy is how we can get so messed up when it comes to selecting a target for our wrath, choosing to scapegoat all the wrong people just because it’s easier to grapple with their superficially annoying traits than it is to do the deep dive into the gaping wounds of our actual traumas. To this day, I struggle to feel appropriate anger at the man who sexually harmed me as a child, but that power trippy woman in the mom’s group from church? I can keep her on my sh*t list for literal years before I heed the Holy Spirit’s nudge to release that bitterness. Homeboy with the road rage obviously had much deeper issues than a minor traffic infraction. If I hadn’t pissed him off, something or someone else would have. He needed an outlet for all that bottled up rage.

The woman who functioned as a mentor for me in my early 20s used to talk about the tendency to create little fires in front of us in order to escape the obligation to deal with the blazing inferno behind us. I think I understand her analogy a bit more now. Like an infectious disease, anger (or hurt) demands that we contend with it. It will keep rearing its ugly head until we do. The question is how should we do it?

We get to feel angry when people hurt us. If someone punches me in the nose, they don’t get to complain when I get blood on their carpet. That’s unreasonable. And there does seem to be a prevalent “just turn the other cheek” thread in Christian discourse that distorts Scripture in a way that sets people up to be dissociative smiling doormats instead of embodied people with genuine emotions and reasonable boundaries. I reject that narrative entirely. God does not require us to enable sin or to pretend to be happy about it. That’s not the brand of forgiveness He requires.

At the end of the day, it’s ultimately about what we choose to do with our anger. Do we feed it until it grows into a full tree of bitterness, or do we continually surrender it to the lordship of Christ?

“Lord, I’m feeling really hurt and really angry. Take my anger and turn it into blessing” is a lot different than “God, I hate this person. Please give him throat cancer.”

I realized, for example, that I had made a lot of progress in forgiving my ex when my heart’s desire was no longer to see him suffer but to see him repent. It’s a shift in focus—one that replaces a desire for vengeance with a desire for healing. And it doesn’t happen overnight, but it does need to be the goal of any professing Christian if we want God to bless us with the forgiveness we so desperately need on a regular basis, too. The Bible isn’t exactly unclear about that. (Matthew 6:14-15)

There’s no way to say this that feels good, so I’ll just say it in a way that feels clear:

At the end of the day, the choice to harbor unforgiveness and hatred is ultimately a failure to contend with the severity of your own sin. There is nothing anyone has done to any of us that is worse than what we personally do to Jesus. Our sins nailed Him to a cross. And yet He forgives. We must too.

That doesn’t mean we forget. It doesn’t mean we withhold accountability. It doesn’t mean we restore relationship. It just means we release the desire to hurt those who harmed us.

Last night, after four years of hanging onto hurt from a past church relationship, through God’s grace to grant me more humility than I’ve previously wanted to muster, I finally extended an olive branch to the target of my bitterness. You guys, the release was instant—even before I got a response from her. It was like I could physically feel the lightening of a load I had stubbornly decided to drag around like a ball and chain to justify my self-selected persecution complex. I wasn’t wrong to feel hurt or even to draw boundaries, but I was wrong to wield unforgiveness like a weapon of self-protection when I knew darn well God was in the restoration business.

If Christmas isn’t the perfect time to pray for restoration in our relationships, I don’t know when is. Just over 2000 years ago, a loving God sent His perfect Son into a broken world to redeem it and restore relationship between the created and the Creator. It’s hard to allow our hearts to be flooded with the joy of the season if they’re already full of something much more toxic. So release that pain and give it to Jesus. Choose to walk in forgiveness and with the courage to hope for healing to replace the hurt.

Here’s to praying for forgiveness and reconciliation to surprise and delight anyone who’s taken the time to read this today.