Throwback Thursday

To participate in Throwback Thursday, using social media, on Thursdays you post a picture of yourself from the past. It’s fun and funny in lots of ways. I suppose it is a healthy way to remember the past.

A lot of us participate in another kind of throwback, which is not healthy and is every day, not just Thursdays. We remember the wrongs others did to us. We become amateur archeologists, digging up the painful past, demanding wrongs be made right.

One day a man was talking to his friend about his wife. "Every time we argue, my wife gets all historical." His friend, correcting him, said, "You mean hysterical." "No, I meant what I said. She gets historical. She brings up everything from the past."

Grudges are heavy things to carry, harming mostly the carrier, but also destroying the possibility of relationships being restored. What’s the answer? Forgiveness.

Forgiveness in many ways is complicated, yet in other ways it is fairly simple. Jesus provides the perfect example. Peter, writing to persecuted people, reminds them they are following in the steps of Jesus. I love what he says in 1 Peter 2:23.

When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.

Jesus absorbed the pain and the injustice of people behaving sinfully. The key, it seems, is found at the end of the verse, "He entrusted himself to him who judges justly." To forgive, I must follow the model of Jesus absorbing pain and injustice, while trusting in a God who will make things right.