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“Trust is out gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it” (Brennan Manning)
I would say that forgiveness actually comes pretty easily for me. Grant it, at first I can approach it with a sense of self-righteousness. Or maybe rather than self-righteousness it is just a deep desire to what I am suppose to do. Regardless of the original motivation, I graciously forgive those who “do me wrong.” Eventually though, thanks to my over-analytical approach to life and unfortunate insecurities with looking like a fool, I have to really ask myself if I am going to forgive that person who trespassed against me. But I feel fairly confident that I am able to rather quickly move to a place of forgiveness. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily like that person. As Martin Luther King acknowledged, we don’t need to like someone who harms us. But I am able to love them. All this is fairly basic Christian teaching on the importance of loving your enemies, realizing that discipleship is in large part seeing the Christ in others.
The message of forgiveness, while in large part being about being free from the burden of resentment, is about how we respond to the past offense by the other. It is in large part about the decisive actions we take when we experience being offended. For forgiveness to stick we will often have to re-forgive as we reflect (emotionally or cognitively) on the offense. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by the 70 times 7, not only completely, but repeatedly. However, trust is a very different story. Trust is about how we deal with the present and future relationship with that person and, in all reality, all people. Trust, like forgiveness, is a choice, but it is also something that must be earned. It must be restored. It is something that exposes places in our own lives that are broken, lonely, and distant. I can relatively easily forgive someone who hurts me at a very personal level, but I may struggle with trusting that person for a very long time and even as I do begin to trust them, it will be incremental. But more significantly, the damage of the broken trust will cause me to interact with everyone in the same way. Not only am I having to re-trust the world around me, but I have to rely on the grace of God to understand why it caused so much pain. It also forces me to remember who my real trust should be in.
When I first left the institutional church I was able to forgive the institution fairly easily after suffering its wrath. In other words, I found it fairly easy to make the cognitive decision to forgive an institution that I found to have harmed me because of elements that were largely out of the control of any individual person within it. I resented and was angry at the organization for a long time, but it wasn’t long before even that faded. But trusting it again has been much more difficult than I anticipated it would be. To make things harder, it has done little to try to earn my trust. Minister friends of mine have reluctantly admitted that the organization is broken, but that I have to love it anyway. My reluctance to trust goes deep for me. But as I have reflected on my lack of trust for the church I have discovered that the deeper issue for me is a lack of trust in the type of faith that the institutional church typically promotes. Whereas an organization is the catalyst for my resentment, it is a faith that I have had to realize is what I don’t trust. A modern telling of the story of God, sure, but faith itself has often left me feeling betrayed. The church’s role in this is that it has tried to educated in that it is my betrayal, not my faith’s that has led to this resentment of mine. But as I grow in comfort with the struggle that is true faith, I have come to see that faith, itself, has betrayed me as often as I have betrayed it. Am I arguing that God betrays me? Absolutely not. In fact, it is not a small task to ask oneself if their faith is in their faith or in God. A faith in God is on a solid foundation, but even in that there is often a theological and philosophical construct of faith that shapes what that faith in God looks like. But faith, that thing that best describes our relationship with God, has betrayed me. Faith has been shaped in me in such a way that it is a theological absolute rather than a pilgrimage. Even though I have been able to forgive the church, my trust in my faith is damaged. I stated that I don’t think God betrayed me, but I don’t think He is simply bystander in this either. God, or that which we have named God, has revealed Himself through this limited paradigm for so long that He has left us dependent on limited exposure to Him. Despite the belief that I have that the ministry of Christ was to grant us greater access to God, God has manifested Himself through modernity to such an extent that those who are seeking new truth within postmodernity often feel as though they are the collateral damage of a new worldview. God has historically revealed Himself through the philosophical and theological paradigms of the day, But for those who exist between two worldviews are left to feel like a prophet, someone with a message, but without a home. How do you trust a faith that is emerging? How do you develop a faith in God with limited faith in faith? This is the struggle of the recovering Christian.
“Trust is out gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it” (Brennan Manning)
I would say that forgiveness actually comes pretty easily for me. Grant it, at first I can approach it with a sense of self-righteousness. Or maybe rather than self-righteousness it is just a deep desire to what I am suppose to do. Regardless of the original motivation, I graciously forgive those who “do me wrong.” Eventually though, thanks to my over-analytical approach to life and unfortunate insecurities with looking like a fool, I have to really ask myself if I am going to forgive that person who trespassed against me. But I feel fairly confident that I am able to rather quickly move to a place of forgiveness. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily like that person. As Martin Luther King acknowledged, we don’t need to like someone who harms us. But I am able to love them. All this is fairly basic Christian teaching on the importance of loving your enemies, realizing that discipleship is in large part seeing the Christ in others.
The message of forgiveness, while in large part being about being free from the burden of resentment, is about how we respond to the past offense by the other. It is in large part about the decisive actions we take when we experience being offended. For forgiveness to stick we will often have to re-forgive as we reflect (emotionally or cognitively) on the offense. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant by the 70 times 7, not only completely, but repeatedly. However, trust is a very different story. Trust is about how we deal with the present and future relationship with that person and, in all reality, all people. Trust, like forgiveness, is a choice, but it is also something that must be earned. It must be restored. It is something that exposes places in our own lives that are broken, lonely, and distant. I can relatively easily forgive someone who hurts me at a very personal level, but I may struggle with trusting that person for a very long time and even as I do begin to trust them, it will be incremental. But more significantly, the damage of the broken trust will cause me to interact with everyone in the same way. Not only am I having to re-trust the world around me, but I have to rely on the grace of God to understand why it caused so much pain. It also forces me to remember who my real trust should be in.
When I first left the institutional church I was able to forgive the institution fairly easily after suffering its wrath. In other words, I found it fairly easy to make the cognitive decision to forgive an institution that I found to have harmed me because of elements that were largely out of the control of any individual person within it. I resented and was angry at the organization for a long time, but it wasn’t long before even that faded. But trusting it again has been much more difficult than I anticipated it would be. To make things harder, it has done little to try to earn my trust. Minister friends of mine have reluctantly admitted that the organization is broken, but that I have to love it anyway. My reluctance to trust goes deep for me. But as I have reflected on my lack of trust for the church I have discovered that the deeper issue for me is a lack of trust in the type of faith that the institutional church typically promotes. Whereas an organization is the catalyst for my resentment, it is a faith that I have had to realize is what I don’t trust. A modern telling of the story of God, sure, but faith itself has often left me feeling betrayed. The church’s role in this is that it has tried to educated in that it is my betrayal, not my faith’s that has led to this resentment of mine. But as I grow in comfort with the struggle that is true faith, I have come to see that faith, itself, has betrayed me as often as I have betrayed it. Am I arguing that God betrays me? Absolutely not. In fact, it is not a small task to ask oneself if their faith is in their faith or in God. A faith in God is on a solid foundation, but even in that there is often a theological and philosophical construct of faith that shapes what that faith in God looks like. But faith, that thing that best describes our relationship with God, has betrayed me. Faith has been shaped in me in such a way that it is a theological absolute rather than a pilgrimage. Even though I have been able to forgive the church, my trust in my faith is damaged. I stated that I don’t think God betrayed me, but I don’t think He is simply bystander in this either. God, or that which we have named God, has revealed Himself through this limited paradigm for so long that He has left us dependent on limited exposure to Him. Despite the belief that I have that the ministry of Christ was to grant us greater access to God, God has manifested Himself through modernity to such an extent that those who are seeking new truth within postmodernity often feel as though they are the collateral damage of a new worldview. God has historically revealed Himself through the philosophical and theological paradigms of the day, But for those who exist between two worldviews are left to feel like a prophet, someone with a message, but without a home. How do you trust a faith that is emerging? How do you develop a faith in God with limited faith in faith? This is the struggle of the recovering Christian.
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