Painful Truth About How To Find Comfort

I'm exploring the minefield of love; there's a country-western song waiting to be written there, but I'll leave it to someone who can play a guitar.

WHEN DO YOU DROP A MATTER, AND WHEN IS A GOOD PURPOSE SERVED BY BRINGING IT UP AGAIN?

As in most things, human selfishness affects how we want to answer this question. None of us LIKES to be reminded of times when WE did wrong. But with incidents where we have cause to believe that we were in the right and someone ELSE did wrong, It's more complicated. There are opposite extremes available to us. Bitter, quarrelsome personalities will cling to EVERY grudge, including made-up grudges. Timid, compliant personalities think ANY sort of peace is better than ANY conflict, so they'll surrender from the start, even if they are entirely in the right.

If we were forced to choose ONLY one or the other of these extremes, then of course the teachings of Jesus would require us to be the timid peacemakers, because no good comes of a strong will that clings to false positions and enjoys feeling angry like taking a drug. But those two extremes AREN'T the only possible positions. It is possible to be gentle in spirit, yet realize that sometimes we have to insist on truth.

Narcissistic, self-worshiping spouses or friends will never become any less narcissistic by always getting their way; they'll only gain momentum in their selfishness, demanding STILL MORE indulgence. Prince Adonijah, who was the last troublemaking son of King David after Amnon and Adonijah died, is reported by Scripture as being a troublemaker EXACTLY BECAUSE he was pampered and never held accountable for his actions. A self-worshiping friend or spouse has a great lie planted in his or her deepest heart; the lie says: "I'm better than other people because I say I'm better, so true justice demands that everyone else give way to me!" This terrible self-deception WILL NOT JUST GO AWAY by itself; if it is never corrected, it will only keep getting worse and worse, right up to the moment when that person drops into everlasting Hell.

So there HAS TO BE some kind of rebuke or correction for selfishness. But specific human situations are so diverse that I can't offer an easy rule that works for every person who needs to be corrected. I can only say here that sometimes a love relationship HAS NO CHANCE of succeeding if there ISN'T some correction of the more-selfish partner. What I can do here is to point out a subtler pitfall to be avoided. It should be easy to see that a wrongdoer must be made to face his wrongness at some point or he'll never become a better person. But it is also true that sometimes an old issue needs to come to light FOR THE GOAL OF PROVING FORGIVENESS.

My first wife Mary Cecilia was a righteous, noble-hearted woman in most ways. To anyone who knew her, I say that no virtue you saw in her was fake; it was all real. But she had exactly one hidden fault which AFFECTED NO ONE BUT ME: one area of behavior where she treated me very badly, and this without justification. It simply SUITED HER PRIDE to mistreat me in this way. This one area of selfishness, a jarring note against her many good qualities, was so deeply planted in her soul that it took the long suffering of her terminal cancer to bring her finally to repentance for it. I know that she confessed this very thing to a priest we knew; she deliberately arranged her confession in such a way that the priest WAS allowed afterwards to give me a hint of what it was about. And a goodbye letter that Mary left for me added confirmation.

I had already forgiven her in my heart for this ongoing offense against me; and I dare to be confident that the way I cared for her in her illness SHOWED HER that I forgave her and loved her. But I have cause to wish poignantly that I actually HAD spoken about it openly, to make my forgiveness unmistakable.

Six weeks or so before the end, while Mary Cecilia still was able to walk around, she came up to me in our kitchen and made a humble attempt to confess directly to me this very same evil habit that she had stubbornly and dishonestly made excuses for in the past. But she had barely begun to confess it to me before I told her, "There's no point in talking about that now." I intended my response as a way of saying it was water under the bridge, a thing to be put behind us. By this point in time, she could no more make any amends to me for what she had done than King David could have raised Uriah the Hittite from the dead, and I would never have asked her to TRY to make any amends now. May God forgive me if some part of my mind WANTED HER TO FEEL BAD about the fact that it was too late for her to undo the injury she had knowingly inflicted on me.

I probably would have felt able to go ahead and speak with Mary openly about it, if not for the fact that in the past she had played a manipulative game in this very area. That is, on several occasions over the years, she had put up a pretense of real remorse for her treatment of me: a pretense which was calculated to force me to say, "No, no, you're not a bad wife at all," because I'd be the bad guy if I didn't say that. No doubt some who read these words have encountered the same head-game from a false friend: fifteen seconds of play-acting at apology, cornering you into play-acting that no offense even happened, in order that the false friend can cut off any future possibility that you would hold him or her accountable for the bad behavior which he or she isn't really sorry for at all.

Now, my Mary Cecilia WASN'T false in her spirit; but in just this one area, affecting only me and revealed to no one else, she had allowed herself to indulge in the self-serving game of insincere apology intended only to silence legitimate rebuke. When she so belatedly DID really repent, I can say in my defense that if I had let the conversation continue, she might actually have offered to try to make some amends to me, and my accepting such an offer would have proven MORE CRUEL to her than my choice to cut the discussion short.

In the weeks we had left after that one attempt she made, I can say truthfully that I went on striving to lessen her bodily suffering, and went on giving her every sort of assurance that all her sins were forgiven. She simply HAD TO realize that I loved her unreservedly. And if she died still feeling ANY doubt of my specific forgiveness for her specific wrongdoing against me in particular.... well, she's IN HEAVEN now, the place where we shall know as we ARE known. So now she absolutely DOES know that I forgave her for that particular bad behavior. And when we meet again up there, no residual harm will remain from that forgiven sin.

Nonetheless, and even with the qualifiers I've given, I still wish that, on that evening in our kitchen, I had allowed Mary Cecilia to make what would have been her ONLY honest confession EVER made to me directly on this issue. My explicitly spelled-out forgiveness would have been an additional solace for her during that home stretch before she passed into the embrace of our forgiving Savior.

So, in conclusion: even if you don't hold a grudge for some wrong you suffered, it might be appropriate to bring the matter up one more time FOR THE VERY SAKE of making forgiveness obvious. And if you are the one who did harm, you CERTAINLY should be willing to endure the temporary embarrassment of saying, "I was wrong and you were right," in order that the wounds can truly be healed.

Truth is supposed to be spoken in love; we are told this endlessly, and usually the speaker's emphasis is ONLY on love as a sentiment. But the cause of love is not helped if truth IS NEVER SPOKEN AT ALL.