Following Up

Alex,

I'm wondering now about all the various shades of excusing, ignoring,forgiving, or fighting. God calls us to forgiveness, but that doesn't mean "putting up" with bad treatment. Yet, that is a part of any relationship. Do closer relationships (like parent, child, spouse, or sibling for example) require absorbing or accepting greater wrong?

Yo!

Forgiveness doesn't mean that you stay in an emotionally vulnerable place in perpetuity.  In other words, forgiveness is different from excusing but it's also different from being a doormat.

So much of this is about your motives.  You could withdraw emotionally or physically from your family in order to "get back" at them.  Or you could pull back because it's wise,
discerning and faithful.  Some of it, too, is about the end game.  If you pull away to punish or get back at them, that's passive-aggressive and it's sin.  

But if you're pulling away to allow space for healing and forgiveness with the ultimate hope being that you re-connect with them in a healthy way that includes good boundaries but also hopes for genuine relating and
connectedness at some point in the future, then that's a blessing, that's the Spirit.

Bottom line: lacking forgiveness/holding onto bitterness does more damage to you than anyone else.  We do it because we think that it imprisons someone else.  But ultimately it destroys our own souls.  So the goal is always the
same goal of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit: reconciliation through genuine forgiveness, which is freedom.  

The paths that might take might not seem all that clear or understandable: Jesus went to the cross, which was not
particularly conventional by any stretch of the 1st century Jewish or Roman imagination.

What is your "way of the cross?"  It might mean owning your own sin to your mom or other family members.  It might mean confrontation: letting people know specifically ways that you've been harmed or things that have caused you pain, but that needs to be done in order to forgive and be reconciled not just to press charges.  It might mean that you need to pull back but you do so to bless everyone involved, not out of spite or getting even or to make them pay.