Forgiveness

“ To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you”

“ If God forgives us, we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.”

Both quotes are attributed to C.S. Lewis.

There is a wisdom in forgiveness. I will start with forgiveness because this how I know my real journey into healing and deliverance from all forms of trauma, abuse, hurt, dysfunction and disappointment started.

Today I heard a quote on forgiveness from the “ourdailybread” app, the woman in the video devotional said that forgiveness is the fertile soil in which everything about our faith in Christ grows and I could not have put it better myself. Forgiveness is definitely the ground in which we not only draw deeply from the deep wells of God’s mercies and wonders and where we grow deep roots. Forgiveness is also the soil in which we build a solid, unshakeable foundation and bear very good fruit.

Without forgiveness, all the evil in our past eventually catches up with us, no matter how far we go, how high we climb, if we have not learnt to forgive ourselves and others, unforgiveness will drag us down and we will eventually fall.

Let me tell you a little story in this blog post to illuminate how God drew me in, then patiently taught and entrenched the principle of forgiveness in me. This is not the only time I have had to forgive but this is most poignant because this was when I learnt the true meaning of forgiveness.

I am still learning the depths of forgiveness and I am still having to forgive even now. Matthew 18: 21-22 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times. It is the way.

However, I will start this story by saying that I had been a Christian for awhile at the point I started learning about the depth of forgiveness. I had been actively participating in church services, going for programmes, even having undergone deliverance, the process of which I am not likely to forget anytime soon. And up until God taught me about forgiveness I did not truly understand the real tenets of Christianity beyond attending church, getting high off the taught word of God and attending the prayer meetings,discipleship classes, seed sowing, tithe giving, fasting and night vigil. I did not understand what living free as a Christian meant until God called me out in church and asked me to forgive the unforgiveable.

Dun-dun duuunnnnn!!

I had arrived in church that day as usual, dressed to the nines, happy to give myself in worship as it has always been my way to: my then church encouraged free expression of worship. You could jump, shout, dance to your heart’s content, sing as loudly as you wanted, it was a no holds bar affair, and I am a no holds bar person, so we fit perfectly. I loved my church and everything about it

As I happily settled in to listen to the word after my amazing and very physical praise and worship session: the Pastor started speaking about a topic I was listening aptly to until he suddenly changed direction. This wasn’t new to me; he is a prophetically inclined pastor so he would get words bubbling up sometimes, a prompting in the spirit. The person or persons who God was speaking to received their word and the service continue as usual. And as usual, I was excited to hear the word until I was not.

The pastor started by saying that there was a woman in here that needed to forgive her husband. I tittered and I believed many people did too because in the country I was in then, there was more chance of a husband needing undeserved forgiveness than a husband not needing it.

I was busy scanning the church to try “to discern” who this woman could be: was it the stone-faced woman we had all heard had a cruel husband or some new couple who were pretending to be happy but the husband had been caught cheating on the wife? Oh, who could it be? Who could it be? I was very curious and not in a good way. I have since repented of my unbridled curiousity but then I did not know better so I did not do better.

I returned my attention to what the pastor was saying since my investigations had proved futile, there were too many similar stories, and the church was huge, it was just an impossible task to put my mind to, and as always, I had prayed not to be distracted, so pay attention I did.

I did not like what I heard the pastor say next: God was telling him that the only way the woman in question could move forward into the promises God had for her life, that God had told her were hers and that she had been praying for years about, all she had been working towards including the ability to become who God called her were all hinged on forgiving her husband.

I was definitely taken aback, this poor woman, what type of caveat was this, would God really “demand” this of a person, to hinge every promise on forgiveness? Surely forgiveness could not be that deep a thing and that serious an issue, wasn’t forgiveness just ignoring or pretending the person or thing did not exist and nothing really happened and then trying to move on. Was it that serious? On the other hand, it never occurred to me that this word had anything to do with me. How could I?

However, as he went on to describe almost intimately this woman’s very desperate situation the more I started to see myself in what he was saying, the angrier I became. How dare God ask such? I thought to myself, God could never ever expect me to forgive this, especially because without His guidance I would still be stuck. God Who knew and understood more than anything I could ever describe.

The depths of what He had drawn and saved me from, how could this same God Who knew all this ask me to forgive. It seemed impossible and I decided the word was not for me after all, God was talking to another unlucky in love and marriage lady. Like I said it was a huge congregration, it could have been anybody. However, at the exact moment I had this thought I heard the pastor say you are refusing to accept this as the truth and you are pulling everything I have out of me. He continued in this line until I was without a shadow of doubt that God was talking to me.

I.was.seething.

The pastor went on to preach about something else after that, his pre-planned message, as if nothing had just happened, as if the word he gave as just an aside had not just shifted my world and thrown me into internal chaos. That one word changed my life; and how glad I am that it did.

 Before it changed the trajectory of my life though, I did not go back to church or have anything to do with God for over two months. I was that angry with what I now knew without a shadow of doubt that God was asking of me.

In those two months outside of church, God never left me alone. Everything started screaming for me to pay attention to forgiveness. Every show I watched, thing I read, stumbled on online, random conversations with people were all about forgiveness. You ought to know right now that once God decides by His Mercy to get your attention, He will not leave you alone until the work is done. Of course, you have a choice whether you will listen or not but God will do what He needs to do to get your attention.

 I never actually told anyone at that point what was going on with me, I was going about my daily bright sun-shiny personality but the internal turmoil of that expectation to forgive from God felt like a hot fiery thing I could not bear, but God saw me through it all.

Now let me back up a little bit because how can someone get so angry about a very brief and random message about forgiveness.  I believe I can clarify why this was so hard for me by giving you a more of a back-story.

The man I married never loved me, he married me as a calculated means to gain social standing.

 He was from the ghetto, and I was not. This sounds terribly stand-offish and I am not saying this to disparage love stories that worked out despite those odds. Infact I love those stories, someone once told I was trying to replicate those odds in my favour. I don’t disagree.

 However, I am saying it was calculated because many wiser people told me it was and because not only did he admit it to me when we first met, he admitted it to a close friend who told me after the marriage ended. Is that not how things work? People confessing what they know after they feel they finally have your ear.  I don’t think I would have heard her anyway if she told when it happened but there you go.

As he never loved me and I was then just a tool, not really human. There was quite a lot of deception, staged activities tied to getting me to stay put long enough for him to get his way.

 This meant there was a significant amount of manipulation, cohesion, gaslighting, trauma and abuse, deceit and definitely spiritual manipulation. All these I found out as the façade unravelled.

The most terrible example of this systematic subjugation was when he had drugged me and raped me two days in a row, the third night, I stayed up and the look I saw on his face when he came into the bedroom he no longer shared with me and then noticed me not sleeping was a look I had never seen on his face before and a look I may never forget for as long as I live. We both stayed awake that night, I did not sleep a wink, neither did he. He had not slept in our bedroom for over year and I will explain more on that later. That was also the first time I became truly afraid for my life. A couple of days after another screaming match, I ran for my life because I knew one of us would die if I did not. Our child was too young and it would be unfair on him to continue to live like that. So I took our child, a small suitcase and only went back when I knew he would not be home to get the rest of our stuff. I kept running until God saved me.

After I left, women he was cheating with would somehow get my number and call me, create Instagram pages trying to intimidate and insult me, send me nudes of them in our bedroom, videos of them together in hot tubs,on holidays. They would call me to say all kinds of things he did to them after they broke up, they called my dad to tell him all kinds of things he was getting up to and how my dad was meant to call him into order.

I was not a saint either, I would scream and shout and hit him in jealous fits whilst we still lived together. I had my own problems with anger and fear. He would hurt me, I would hurt him,it was a constant cycle of madness, something I had grown up with and had promised myself never to repeat. But here I was doing the same thing over and over again. I knew the sham of a marriage was done when I finally decided to start cheating on him 3 months before I finally left the house. He had not raped me then. I justified this decision because he had refused to have sex with me throughout our short-lived 2 year marriage. He confessed to his grandmother once when his family had come to our house on his birthday and I had again packed my bags ready to go. When confronted by her, he confessed that he was punishing me. I was shocked but I still stayed even after rumours started coming out that he had been married before me and that he had a child from that marriage. This was confirmed by many people, but he denied it and as with those things then I believed him instead. He withheld all forms of intimacy for those two years fraught with trauma. I did end up cheating on him and every time I did, it was a way to punish him and a way for me to feel desirable again. Like I said I was not a saint either.

Aren’t you glad that God saved me from this horrible lifestyle. I know I sure am. Let’s keep going, it only gets better.

I believe that once he realised that I was of no use to him in terms of social climbing he discarded me and went out of his way to systemically torment me.

Whenever I told anyone what was going on, nobody actually believed me because he had systemically ensured that everyone saw me as the belligerent trouble-maker, the problem, the liar. He was always the good guy and as a good storyteller and a pathological liar, I was always out manuevered in a game I was not even aware I was playing, whose rules I knew absolutely nothing about, thank God for saving me. Writing this now is a testimony of how far God has brought me.

I never once told family members the truth about what I was really going through. Afterall they had all warned me not to marry him then, I was defiant and adamant then and now I felt too much shame and believed I had to live with the consequences of my decisions and submit to my punishment. It was also clear they would not have had a way out for me, I had just become another woman in a deeply problematic marriage in a nation filled with deeply problematic marriages. The advice would have been to continue at it, as always it boiled down to that, or worse: do it for the children. The poor children who would eventually make the same mistakes, continuing an unending pattern of abuse and dysfunction.

Because of all this and much more, so much more, I had sought solace in God and in the church and now it felt as if God was rejecting my needs too by telling me to forgive. How could God ask me to forgive all of this?

How could my enjoying my new life in Christ have anything to do with forgiving the unforgivable? Why would God ask this of me?

This is why I am now telling you my story of freedom, and going on to explain why it all had to start with forgiveness.

If I am extremely honest with you, forgiveness is not something that can be done alone. You cannot go through the process of recollecting the things that need to be forgiven especially if there’s trauma involved, working through them and then actually forgiving people, on your own. It will not last. It is not easy to forgive and I am not trying to take anything away from anyone’s experiences and this is why I am sharing my story first, before we get into the principle and processes of forgiveness. I am sharing first so that you know I get it. It isn’t easy but it is doable.

Do not try to work on forgiveness on your own. First start with God. Go to Him for help and guidance and then allow Him open the path of forgiveness to you.

This is how God took me through the journey.

To be continued in Forgiveness Part 2