“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” Jesus teaches us to pray.
In some churches the worshipers recite that line every Lord’s day. If we do more than rattle off a rote ritual, this must be one of the scariest lines in the whole Bible. Do we really want God’s mercy to mimic ours? Some of us find it almost impossible to forgive.
People like Juliet, for example. I never knew her real name, but that’s what she chose to go by when she told her tale at a counseling seminar many years ago.
“Mom worked nights most of the time I was growing up.” Juliet began her story so quietly we strained to hear. “So she didn’t know when it began.”
“Truth is—” her jaw tightened “—she didn’t want to know. But from the time I was 11 years old, my stepfather slipped into my bed most nights as soon as Mom got out the driveway.
“At first I protested and told him to leave me alone, but he told me it was his job to teach me how to love a man properly when I got married. What he taught me instead was how to detest the very thought of any man looking at me or touching me the way he did.”
Tears ran down Juliet’s face as she recited her tale. Angry splotches of red betrayed the rage that filled her soul anew as she relived those awful days.
“I told Mom what he was doing.” Again her words got icy quiet. “But she scolded me and told me I was a silly child making up awful stories about a good man who kept a roof over our heads and food on our table.
“Once or twice I tried telling a friend at church or a teacher at school, but he was an important man in town and nobody believed me. So I finally gave up trying.”
When Juliet was 16 and old enough to drive, she began making up reasons to stay at a girl friend’s home or at her grandma’s place every night. Her stepfather protested, but she told him she would call the cops if he ever touched her again.
“That was 15 years ago. Mom’s still married to that lecher,” Juliet told us. “They want me to bring my kids to family gatherings, but I refuse to go anywhere near that awful man. I hope he burns in hell.”
Philip Yancey is right when he says “the only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.”