Sunday, August 16, 2015

Grieving for the One Who Has Betrayed or Abused You

“We mourn for those who cared for us the way they should have. We also mourn for those who did not give us the love we deserved.”
— Kübler-Ross & Kessler
RESENTMENT does not always die with death. Often it lingers. More is the pity.
But the truth is we can grieve for the person — who has died or has left — even if they have betrayed or abused us, or have done injustice to us. To grieve them is to give voice to a need within us, even if we vacillate between hating and loving them; or even if we cannot stand the thought of them, yet somehow we know we cannot get free of them.
Getting free is to grieve them. We grieve them how the Holy Spirit says we should: we grieve who they should have been and who they were.
We must let them go. Letting them go is about having nothing more against them. That, when it is achieved, is the freedom they and we have long sought and needed.
Mourning for those who did not give us what we deserved requires surrender. That is, to go against our anger into our sadness. That is, to stop for a moment of withholding love, in a way to project God’s love deep into the bitter visceral fissures of our being — to entreat our soul to healing. Be real about the sadness. It will take time.
Grieving the person who has cast an injustice toward us, knowingly or not, is a wisdom portion. It trusts God to do his work of healing so we can move on into acceptance.
There is little we can do to achieve the peace we need and deserve other than to immerse ourselves in that person’s brokenness who let us down. They were not all that God would have them be. Yet, neither are we.
As we recoil in the understanding that God knows and is acutely aware of what we’ve been through, we’re assured; life doesn’t need to end this way. Healing is our destiny.
***
The way to healing is simpler than we realise, but, of course, it’s not an overnight process.
God is giving us the routine opportunity to learn to surrender day after day after day to this situation that has us betwixt and between. Despite the pain there’s a purpose.
We see, the basic purpose of God is that we learn, in a very deep and real way, how to forgive. God has a unique way for us. Such a hard lesson can only be learned over time through the actual doing of it. And we do it without expectation of blessing.
What a humbling thing it is that we cannot control this process of being healed. We can only submit to it.
The blessings of freedom and peace will come in their own time and way.
It’s faith to trust God for the healing, freedom and peace we seek.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.

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