Eight years ago I sat with a group of men in a crowded diner for our regular Tuesday morning breakfast gathering. I was new to the group, having become their pastor only a few months earlier. One of the older men, a rough person in his seventies who was known for his brusque comments, made a racist joke. Immediately, everyone at the table looked at me. I responded with what I considered a mild, pastoral rebuke, and we went on with our meal.
Later, another man from the group pulled me aside. “You will have to forgive John,” he said, “He was in the Pacific during WWII, and he has never been able to forgive the Japanese. He hates them, and he really does not like that you drive a Honda. This was his way of letting you know that.”
John and I never really got along, although we learned to work together and his frustration with me evolved to a grudging tolerance. Several years ago John died.
It was easy for me to judge John’s hatred for the Japanese as indicative of a weakness in his spiritual life. It was also easy for me to look down on him for it. After all, I’m not like that. I don’t hate any group of people, and I certainly don’t go around making racist jokes and slurs.
However, the Holy Spirit has a way of showing me things about myself that I have worked hard to hide. John’s hatred for a race of people was due to his life-changing experience during a horrible war. In my own heart, I have allowed my experience with some individuals to grow from anger into bitterness - the raw material of hatred. There is the youth pastor who molested my friend, the boss who made my life miserable, and, I am ashamed to admit, too many others.
It is easy for me to answer the question, “Do you hate?” with a glib, “No, of course not.” But if I am faced with the question, “Whom do you hate?” my mind, under the guidance of the Spirit, does not so easily cover up my failure to allow God’s perfect love to control all of my relationships. “Yes,” I am forced to honestly confess, “I hate.”
In this confession, it is once again revealed that there is still work to be done in my life, and I am still in need of forgiveness by a God who is ready to forgive – more ready to forgive me than I was ready to forgive John.
So, if I may be so bold as to ask, whom do you hate?
Mike,
ReplyDeleteI have experienced personal conflict with people in my past. I believe that it is because of the work of the Holy Spirit in my life that those situations and my feelings at that time are no longer active. To be able to say this is not to say that I arrived at this position easily nor quickly. With the help of the Spirit and with time and distance from the situation I have found peace to have replaced bitterness (hatred). Walking in another’s shoes, if you will, enables us to better understand their feelings but does not mean that we have to enable them to live in their hate and bitterness. It should enable us to better understand and to give grace to hurting people. However, understanding where the pain comes from does not mean we don’t gently confront (if that is our responsibility or the person asks us for our opinion) the need to bring those feelings and emotions under the grace of the cross.
While this response seems pious and theoretical to me, I cling to it because I trust in the ability of the Holy Spirit to do what otherwise is impossible. This confidence comes from many life experiences that have required much work by God’s gentle Spirit to rid bitterness and anger from my thinking about people and circumstances. I have found that it is in these days of the Spirit working in me that true healing has happened and I can better face future circumstances. We cannot under-value what the Holy Spirit is capable of doing if there is a willing heart. PRS
sometimes everyone, sometimes just me
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