Love so Amazing – Forgiveness so freeing. (Part 1)

Warning – introspective post ahead with many unanswered questions.

It has been a year. A year with ups, downs, curveballs, bumpy roads. The usual type of year. What made this year different, however, was that it was possibly one of the most emotionally confrontational and revealing years of my life. God has used this year to force me to deal with things that I have left buried or abandoned in a dusty, unvisited area of my brain. You could relate it to one of those closets where all of the annoying things get tossed or stored for later sorting.

This is the year that my parents got divorced. Not too unusual in this day and age, not entirely unexpected, not really an emotionally damaging experience, but very disappointing, nonetheless. For years, I had thought to myself that this was a distinct possibility, but deep down I never believed it would happen. Infidelity changes many things.

My relationship with my father has never been close. We do not have much in common, in fact, I can’t think of anything I have in common with him besides family members and a strange sense of humor. While this has bothered me occasionally through the years, it hasn’t bothered me enough to try to change this, and there hasn’t been much effort on his end either. The once or twice a year I would actually speak to him on the phone was awkward and brief. Our conversations mostly consisted of the weather, cars, his motorcycle club and his dog. Whenever anything more personal came up, it was shut down pretty quick, admittedly by both of us. I was able to justify this because I knew my mother would relate any relevant and interesting information to him

When my mom left my dad, I quickly took sides. Not on the surface, of course. Out loud, I spread the guilt almost equally between the two of them, with a bit more going to my dad because of the adultery. On the inside, however, I assigned 95% of the blame to him. I reasoned that if he was emotionally absent to me, he certainly wasn’t any more emotionally available with my mom.

This is when God started to do his awesome thing. It took a comment from a wonderful woman of God in our small group to get me to start thinking. Her words, “Have you forgiven your father yet?” struck a sore spot that I didn’t know existed. Her words haunted me for days. Have I forgiven him? Does he deserve forgiveness? I don’t even know how I really feel about him given the fact that our relationship has always been so distant. God really started showing me the many ways I spoke badly of my father and jumped to conclusions about him. The judgment that resided in my heart towards my father colored every thought that I had about him. Every time I spoke ill of my father, God began to poke me. If my lack of relationship with him was supposedly not affecting my life, than why was I bringing him up so often and portraying him in a negative light?