This story may sounds like a movie script but it actually happened.
Jonathan came from a very poor family. There were seven of them in the family and he was the eldest. His father was a farmer while his mother used to wash the clothes of their neighbors to make both ends meet.
He wanted to finish school, find a good job, and help his family.
On the other hand, Mario was the only son of a wealthy family. He got whatever he wanted in life. He had a nanny who took care of him when he was growing up. He didn’t worry about his future since his father was a businessman who owned a well-known and prosperous company.
Jonathan and Mario crossed paths when they were in high school.
He worked as a janitor by day and was a student by night. Oftentimes, he went home famished. But despite this, he still managed to be at the top of his class.
Mario, meanwhile, was very popular among ladies because he was very handsome.
However, he was always defeated by Jonathan when it came to examinations and quizzes. Mario didn’t like the idea of not graduating as class valedictorian; so he told his father about it.
The father went to the administration and talk with the faculty. As expected, Mario was chosen as class valedictorian although their classmates knew it should have been Jonathan.
It was not being the top of the class which Jonathan was really aiming at but the scholarship that went along with being a valedictorian.
Life went on. Jonathan attended a not-so-popular college, where he met Alice, the woman who loved him despite his status in life. As fate would have it, Mario courted Alice but her heart already belonged to Jonathan.
When Mario learned she preferred Jonathan over him, he fumed.
As a way of retaliation, Mario kidnapped Alice. At their beach house, he raped her several times. She was stabbed to death but survived. Despite what had happened to her, Jonathan still married Alice.
Today, the happily married couple is blessed with three children. When asked if he has already forgiven Mario of what he and his family had done to him, Jonathan replied: “Yes, a long time ago. The hatred I had for him was buried when I married Alice.”
To forgive, as defined by the Webster’s New World Dictionary, is “to give up resentment against or to give up the desire to punish; pardon; to overlook an offense; to cancel a debt.” Thus, the goal of forgiveness is to let go of a hurt and move ahead with life.
The Holy Bible has taught us why we should forgive and how we should do it. The Lord’s Prayer told us:
“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Also in the same vein, “For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matthew 6:14).
Someone once said, “We are most like beasts when we kill. We are most like men when we judge. We are most like God when we forgive.”
At one time, General James Oglethorpe and John Wesley met in a party. One of the topics they talked about was forgiveness. “I’ll never forgive,” General Olglethorpe told Wesley. “Then I hope, sir,” Wesley replied, “you never sin!”
“It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own,” Jessamyn West said.
Arthur W. Pinero seems to have the same thing in mind when he quipped, “If you have a thing to pardon, pardon it quickly. Slow forgiveness is little better than no forgiveness.”
A Turkish soldier had beaten a Christian prisoner until he was only half-conscious, and while he kicked him he demanded, “What can your Christ do for you now?” The Christian quietly replied, “He can give me strength to forgive you.”
“Forgiveness is our command,” C. Neil Strait said. “Judgment is not.” Remember the story of the woman who was caught in adultery, as chronicled in the Book of John (8:1-11)?
She was brought by the teachers of the law and the Pharisees before Jesus and asked what they need to do, for the Law of Moses commanded them to stone the adulteress.
Although indirectly, Jesus told the group: “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” No one dared; in fact, they went away, one at a time, until only Jesus was left and the woman.
“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” Jesus asked. “No one, sir,” the woman replied. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Forgiveness, however, does not happen instantly. It takes time. In The Freedom of Forgiveness, author David Augsburger writes: “Forgiveness is not an act – it is a process.
It is not a single transaction – it is a series of steps. Beware of any view of instant, complete, once-for-all forgiveness. Instant solutions tend to be the ways of escape, of avoidance, or of denial, not of forgiveness.
Forgiveness takes time – time to be aware of one’s feelings, alert to one’s pain and anger, open to understand the other’s perspective, willing to resolve the pain and reopen the future.”
Once you have forgiven a person, forget the wrongs. “A forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note, torn in two and burned up, so that it never can be shown against the man,” Henry W. Beecher said.
Sydney Harris was even more apt: “There’s no point in burying a hatchet if you’re going to put up a marker on the site.”
If you don’t forgive and forget, the errors done to you by another person will keep coming back. “Forgiving is the only way to heal the wounds of a past we cannot change and cannot forget,” wrote Lewis Smedes, author of The Art of Forgiveness.
“Forgiveness changes a bitter memory into a grateful memory, a cowardly memory into a courageous memory, an enslaved memory into a free memory… When we forgive… we open the door to an unseen future that our painful past had shut.”
For comments, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
