Forgiving is Accepting // Forgive and Forget, Part 2

Every person we will ever meet, is going to annoy us at some point. Something in their personality will grate, something they do will hurt … so what’s the secret of having a great relationship anyway?

It seems that there are really only two types of people in this world: those who love getting up early in the morning and those who don’t, those who love cats and those who hate them. Or, you know what I mean. It seems that different people just come out of different moulds. We have different likes and dislikes, different strengths and weaknesses. And as much as those differences make life interesting, they make life fun. They can also just plain get on our nerves.

So how do we make sure that for our part, the differences between us and other people become a source of pleasure instead of pain, richness instead of resentment?

As I’ve watched people over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that with every strength in a person, there’s an equal and opposite weakness.

It’s like Newton’s Law of Physics. You know, you meet someone with really good insights. You know they see things so clearly; they articulate a situation so well. And you go, wow, you know that person’s clever. But often on the down side, they can be judgmental and blunt; they can be intolerant of other people’s opinions that differ from their own.

When you meet a person with a real servant heart. My wife’s like this. They’re the sort of person that always gets up to get the coffees. When you’re out at dinner, they always get up and help the hostess and say, “Let me help you clean up.” They’re always the first to volunteer for something. It’s wonderful being around someone like that.

But on the flip-side, people like that can be critical of others who don’t help as much as they do. They can be pushy or interfering in their eagerness to help.

Or when you meet a strong and capable leader. You know, someone with real vision and that gift and ability to get other people just to follow them. But on the down side leaders like that can become upset with people who don’t share the same goals and visions. They can regress into using people to accomplish their goals and visions.

And have you ever met the sort of person that’s got what I call a pastoral gifting? You know they’re just the sort of person that will pull alongside someone else who’s struggling with whatever. And they’ll just spend whatever time is needed talking, having coffee, visiting them in hospital. Have you met those people when you think if I was ever stranded on a desert island, that’s the sort of person I’d like to be stranded on an island with.

The flip-side though is that people like that are really good managers of their time. They’re rarely people who can force a whole bunch of things into a given time because the whole point of their gift and ability is that they don’t worry about time as much as they worry about relationships.

There’s a pattern isn’t there? Every strength seems to come with a corresponding weakness. I wonder if any of those ring a bell for you. For me, absolutely. My gig is insights and teaching and leadership. That’s, I guess, what I do. And as I came as a businessman, someone who’d worked in business and commerce for sixteen or seventeen years, into Christian ministries, people saw some skills and abilities and thought, well gee I could use that skill in my ministry. I could use that ability that Berni has in my ministry. And they asked me to do a whole bunch of things like pastor a church.

Can I tell you something? I think I would be hopeless at pastoring a church because I don’t have the heart to do it. I don’t have the sort of pastoral giftings, the gift to want to sit with people for a long time. That’s just not me.

And so it’s really easy to look at someone and only want to harvest the things that are good about them. And yet, when you interact with them on a day-to-day basis, it’s the other side of the coin. It’s the weaknesses. It’s their failures that hurt us, that grate on us, that ultimately drive us nuts.

Reality? You and I are a package of strengths and weaknesses. I know I am and it’s very true of me. I have some strengths but I also have some weaknesses. And the person that knows most about my weaknesses is obviously my wife. She could sit here for quite a long time and share with you all of my weaknesses. You wonder why I never have my wife on the program! And you know if it’s true of me it’s true of you too.

But the funny thing is, we are so quick to justify our own weaknesses. Well you know, it’s just how I am. I just can’t change that thing about me. But then we look at other people. And even though it’s true about them too. Even though every other person that you and I will ever meet is a package deal of strengths and weaknesses, what we want them to do is we want them to be only strengths. We don’t want to accept the package deal that comes with every person that we meet. And as we get to know their weaknesses and limitations just that little bit better, we go from boy what a wonderful person with all these strengths, to a state of mild annoyment, to a state of anger, to a state of resentment as we get to know their weaknesses better and better.

Question: Who right now do you resent? I mean who’s driving you just crazy in life right now, grating on you? If you look at that person, my hunch is that you would be able to come and sit here behind this microphone and list their weaknesses down to the ‘nth detail with at least three case examples of each weakness. But probably at the same time if I asked you, “Well list their strengths as well,” maybe the way that you describe their strengths wouldn’t be as full and complete and with quite as many case examples as their weaknesses. Because when someone’s driving us nuts, we focus on their weaknesses. We don’t focus on their strength.

Yesterday we talked about forgiveness as something that we do after the event. You know when someone’s hurt us or someone’s done something wrong, we know we need to forgive them in order to still have a relationship with them. In order for us to get on with it, to get over the pain, and to be able to live our lives free of the hurts from the past.
But there’s another form of forgiveness that happens before the event. And that forgiveness is called acceptance. It’s saying, this person whom I know is a package deal. And you know something? Just like I accept everything I like about them, I am also going to accept their weaknesses.

Maybe it’s someone at work, and before you walk into the room and have the meeting, you know exactly how they’re going to react. You know exactly what weaknesses are going to emerge. You just know because you’ve seen the pattern over and over again. And you decide to forgive them before you walk into the meeting, so that when they happen, you can let it wash straight past you. We grow and we become mature when we are able to apply the same excuses to someone else’s weaknesses that we apply only too readily to our own.

Maybe wives it’s when your husband comes home, and he just doesn’t want to talk, and he sits down in front of the television, and you get so angry with him because he doesn’t communicate. And right then there’s a decision to make. You can either nag him. You can give him the silent treatment on the one hand. Or you can say, hang on, this is just the way that my husband copes with stress. And he needs my help. I might just show him some love, some affection. I might just give him a bit of space and then come and just stroke his cheek. You know how many husbands would die to have their wives do that for them.

And husbands and maybe, you know, when your wife is scratchier, and she’s got PMT, and it really hurts because she’s ignoring you. And you feel like she’s emotionally not there. Well, is it her fault? Or can you say, well that’s something that I just have to love her through, and I will accept her as a package deal with that included because she’s my wife and I love her.

The Apostle Paul, two thousand years ago, wrote a letter to a church in Corinth and he said:

Look, we’re like a body. And a body has a foot and hand. If the foot said, ‘well the hand’s not like me. The hand can’t make the body walk around.’ And the foot said, ‘I don’t want the hand.’ And if the ear said, ‘well I don’t need the eye. Let’s make the whole body an ear.’ Where would we be?

It’s a good picture isn’t it? I can point back to some clear decisions of accepting people in my life as a package deal. Can I tell you something? The people whom I have accepted as a package deal, I have a great relationship with. Because when the weaknesses surface that I know are going to surface. You know something? I can smile to myself inside and say, “I’m going to love them anyway”.