Dearest Chloe and Phoebe,
It’s completely natural to dislike or even hate someone who has wronged you. Is this a sin? Imagine a parent who has just lost their child to a malicious murder. Would it be wrong to hate the murderer? Of course not.
My heart has been consumed with hate lately. I may not have lost a loved one to a malicious murder but something valuable was taken from me. I find myself fantasizing about my perpetrators’ demise.
But I know it’s my Christian duty to forgive. God forgave me for everything at so colossal a cost. Moreover, I know that continuing down this hate path would hurt no one more than myself. Hate would consume my energy, rob me of optimism, deprive me of sleep, deteriorate my health, and who knows what else. But it’s been a seemingly insurmountable task most days, trying to forgive.
That’s because I’ve been going about forgiveness all wrong.
If conjuring up warm and fuzzy feelings towards someone who has just performed demolition on your life is the definition of forgiveness, then I’m afraid God has tasked us with an impossible ask. Luckily he hasn’t.
Feelings are neither sin nor virtue, C.S. Lewis says. Just as it’s neither a sin nor virtue to like apples and hate carrots, how you feel towards another human being is neither a reflection of how good you are or how bad you are. It’s a simple matter of fact. This is so important to understand.
The moment you understand that feelings are neither sin nor virtue, you can stop focusing on them, trying to justify them, and stop feeling guilty for them. Don’t we often pine over the injustice done to us, only to pine over why we feel this way? This is all a waste of time, largely because we can’t really control how we feel, at least not right away.
What you should focus on instead, is how you would treat your enemy if you loved them, or at the very least didn’t hate them. How you respond in spite of how you feel, this act is sin or virtue. And the more we can move toward an action that is contrary to our feelings, the more you will be heaping burning coals on your enemy’s head.
You aren’t giving up on justice. You are simply handing over the justice due you and placing it in God’s hands. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and he will repay. But we cannot have our revenge without staining our own hands. Only God can avenge without turning evil himself.
So I have tasked myself each day with this simple ask and here’s what I’ve come up.
- Don’t think about how much I hate them. Acknowledge that I do, then move on. Don’t be fooled. Being engrossed in thoughts of hurting someone, is an act of hate.
- Confront the perpetrator if possible. Lying dormant and letting your perpetrator continue the injustice and step all over you is not godly. I believe it’s important to confront your offender, so long as the opportunity exists. Let them know how wrong this was and how much it hurt you. Grant them the opportunity to apologize.
- Find one commonality between me and my perpetrators. This will humanize them.
- Don’t slander them. In the simplest form, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. While it’s important to confide in someone, don’t let the purpose of the conversation be to smear someone’s reputation.
Let this simple Q&A be what grounds you when you are in the trenches of a hate war like I currently am. When, not if, they come, don’t waste your time on your feelings. Focus your energy on action. This very action, to do right in spite of a wrong – this is forgiveness.
You may not always succeed at doing the right thing. But by merely trying to obey him, you are obeying him. And when you’ve continued down this path to commit to do right in spite of your feelings, the great Lewis says we will discover the “great secret.” And it is a good secret, indeed.
“When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking hime less,” says Lewis.
“The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards, they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become – and so on in a vicious circle for ever.”
Since that fateful day I had come to grasp the meaning of forgiveness – to act in spite of how I feel – I’ve found myself hating less in feeling. It is a far cry from having loving feelings towards them. But I can also attest that the more acts of love I pour into raising the two of you, the more I love you in feeling.
So perhaps you can’t perform Jedi mind tricks on your feelings, but you can alter your feelings by taking the road less traveled. While we might initially and instinctively act based on our feelings, in the end our feelings follow our actions.