Daily Wisdom for Women - February 1, 2023

 February 1, 2023 - Forgiveness  "Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, 'Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me?  Up to seven times?'  Jesus answered, 'I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.'"  Matthew 18: 21-22

I struggle with forgiveness.  If you know me at all, you know that my relationship with my mother was volatile at best.  She enjoyed telling people how wrong they were, how much better she was than other people, and how knowledgeable she was about, well, everything. There was abuse, mostly verbal and emotional, but when I was younger there was also physical.  Within the last 10 years I handled the situation much better than previously, and I knew I needed to forgive, but it was hard.  I could never tell her that I forgave her because she would turn that back at me and tell me that there was nothing to forgive her for!  What would she have done that required forgiveness?  If anyone needed forgiveness, it would be me because of all of the bad things I had done, and she could list them started with things that had happened when I was in high school.   She would be appalled that I had the audacity to even think that *I* should be the one to forgive *her* because she was totally blameless for anything.  She never did anything wrong.  She never hurt anyone.  She never made anyone feel badly.   So I struggled.

I still do struggle...a little.  But devotions like this help.  I like the idea of separating our emotions and our actions from whatever offense was committed against us.  I guess I did that in the last weeks/months of Mom's life.  Each time we would be in Wooster in the time from January-May 2017, and there were many times, we would visit Mom.  I tried to keep things civil, even friendly, between us.   For the first time in a long time, she didn't trash me as soon as she saw me and she didn't try to make me feel bad.  I think the trick was that I would ask her about ancestors, using Megan's work with Ancestry.com as the reason.  Once she started to talk about the past, she was fine.  Actually she shifted her antagonism to Greta instead of me, which usually didn't happen.  I felt bad for Greta bearing the brunt of Mom's attacks and hatred, but I was relieved that she wasn't attacking me.  

The last line in today's devotion means a lot to me because I think I have done this in the time since Mom died.  "When we truly forgive someone, we send away those feelings; we step back from them and no longer allow them to influence our actions."  I have tried hard to send away the feelings.  As Gary has encouraged me to do, I have put them in a box and stored that box in the basement.  I have tried hard to step back from the emotions and even though I have some moments when the pain rushes back, I have been successful at storing them away.