Has someone ever cut you off in traffic or stepped in front of you in line?
Has anyone ever taken advantage of you or taken something that belonged to you?
Has anyone ever acted in a way which inflicted significant pain or loss in your life?
How do you react in those moments? What thoughts go through your head? What do you say to that person, even if just in your mind?
While anger is an appropriate emotion, what do you, what do we, do with it?
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl writes, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Growth and freedom. Neither comes without effort and persistence.
One area where our response dictates our ability to achieve growth and freedom is dealing with those who wrong us.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says the following:
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,” But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)
The word translated perfect in this passage is the Greek word teleioi, a word better understood as meaning complete rather than achieving some standard to gain God’s favor. God already accepts us, flaws and all. What teleioi gets at is something more beautiful, an invitation towards completeness, integration, wholeness.
Our reaction to those who hurt us impacts our move towards Shalom, this peace found in wholeness. Jesus does not instruct us to pray for our enemies because it makes us better, but because it makes us better.
It isn’t about earning our standing with God, better in the sense of worth or value. Rather, it makes us better as human being, more inline with being fully human and ushering the Kingdom into the world.
I pray for a list of people each morning. Included in that list are people who have done significant harm to me, my life, my finances, and my overall well-being. Some mornings reading those names causes anger to rise up inside, but I pray anyway, praying for their health, their heart, and their well-being. Some days those those prayers are an act of pure will, but that diminishes as time marches forward.
This isn’t to tell you how good I am; there’s plenty of evidence to discredit that notion. Rather, hopefully you can understand how much healing this practice has brought, slowly nudging me towards forgiveness and peace, allowing me to learn the act of letting go of bitterness. It leads me to focus more on the humanity of those individuals rather than what they did.
We are all created in the image of the divine and all contain the divine spark, even if we fail to acknowledge or realize it. My prayers help me witness to the divine spark in everyone, even those who have wronged me.
I still have appropriate boundaries where required. This practice of prayer actually helps me maintain those boundaries at times, both physically and emotionally.
In the space Frankl talks about between stimulus and response, we choose our response. Unfortunately, we live in a world encouraging us to chose revenge, retaliation, and hate.
I invite you to take a different course. Even when it seems incredibly difficult, I invite you to choose the response which can bring you, and ultimately the world, the healing and peace we so desperately need.
Breaking Into Peace 