Love does no harm

What is the greatest injury someone can commit that ripples infectiously to their core thereafter seeping outward into the lives of others?

I propose that unforgiveness is the greatest injury we commit against ourselves and neighbors whose infection ripples to our core, resulting in a world of disease. It begins with dishonor and culminates in vengeance, a strong desire to inflict punishment or exact retribution for an injury or wrong.

We’ve all suffered wounds. Whether physical, psychological or spiritual, we’ve experienced the bitter sting of gutting and piercings inflicted on us by others or by us.

The nature of wounding is that it is a deeply felt injustice such that it demands retribution, one way or the other. Yet it is this innate feature that often hinders the healing of our wounds, instead resulting in the spread of infection in our inner man, transforming us into oozing fiends who perpetuate impetuous retaliation for any real or imagined injury.

In my mother tongue, the proverb goes that “ahar’abantu, haba uruntu-runtu.” A phrase loosely translating that where there are people, there will be humanness. This is simply due to the fact that we all have unique wickedness and are often oblivious to it and to how we inflict it on others around us, including ourselves.

It is this ignorance that rouses our innate demand for vengeance against another not realizing that we too are condemned. So on we go about accumulating grudges and dishing out revenge, foolishly guzzling poison and degrading our neighbors.

It’s easy for us to recognize when others dishonor us but we seldom consider how often we dishonor others, even when we think we mean well. Nevertheless, it is vital to know that Perfect Law does not condone the dishonor of His image-bearer by anyone.

This truth is illustrated in Jesus’ parable of The Unmerciful Servant: one day, Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples wants to know [as we all do] how many times he should forgive someone who wrongs him. In response, Jesus tells a story of a King who decided to bring his accounts up to date. He called those servants who owed him and demanded they repay what they owed. There was a servant who owed him about three and a half billion US dollars ($3.5B) and since he couldn’t pay it, the king ordered that he, his wife, children and all he had be sold in settlement of his debt. The servant fell to his knees and begged the king for mercy. The king took pity on him, cancelled the debt and let him go.

Now when this servant went out, he met his fellow-servant who owed him a negligible amount of about eighty-four US dollars ($84), he grabbed him and began to choke him demanding immediate payment. The fellow-servant fell to his knees and begged for a payment extension but the wicked servant refused and had the man thrown into prison till he could pay the debt.

When the other servants saw this, they were astonished and told the king. Outraged, the king called that servant and handed him over to the jailers to be tortured until he should pay back all he owed.

Basically to dishonor someone is to humiliate them. How sad it is that often, like the wicked servant, we tend to dish out heaps of humiliation on tiny matters when we’ve been spared disgrace on grander scales.

Of course, because the universe revolves around us, we are hard-pressed to consider whether our speech and conduct humiliates those around us. It is through our speech (in all its forms) and our conduct that we can make someone else feel foolish and debased, which results in injured dignity. Everyone has a right to dignity; and although we often demean and succeed at dishonoring others, that does not remove the reality of every person’s intrinsic dignity that is due to them, on pain of God’s wrath.

A little while ago, I completed Dr. Bruce Wilkinson’s course on forgiveness where I learned one of the steps in the forgiveness process which is to list every name of anyone who has hurt me. Once listed, and beginning with those who have hurt me the most, I was to detail specific wounds (injuries, and harms) each person inflicted whether accidentally or purposefully.

I’ve been staggered to see how much of the wounding I’ve suffered was a direct injury to my dignity, and how consequent rebellious, insolent and malevolent speech and conduct towards others seems to be a good tell-tale sign that our own or another’s, dignity has suffered an injury.

The hardest part about recovering from injuries to our dignity is reviving from the shock that the people who we hope to love us are in fact the ones who wound our dignity the most.

But what of our wounding others? Recognizing that I am also capable of causing injury to others’ dignity was quite a breakthrough. This happened to me when I dared to read my husband’s list of wounds I’d inflicted on him. In my self-righteousness, I was indignant that he should have any charge against me, seeing how loving and caring and longsuffering I had been with him.

Abstracting that we are more often villains than saint is a difficult task due to our inherent human defect of self-importance.

It may be just me but for a very long while I had no concept that someone else could have feelings, thoughts, and dreams that could be hurt just as my own could, and were.

I have often been acutely aware of when I’ve been dishonored, and because I am prone “to keep peace at the moment” (better known as brooding), it was difficult for me to tell someone off so I often let the wounds fester. Some people react directly but it seems most are like me. I think this could be a learned handicap from when we were children and couldn’t talk back.

But even when we learn to talk back, we have trouble being talked back to. This became apparent to me through the many duels with my family and husband. Not many people will admit but on many occasions I found myself expecting honor from others – young and old, all the while dishonoring them, not considering them; seeking only fulfillment, validation, and justification of my own interests.

As I reflected on my speech and conduct in the past, I was firstly jolted awake by my self-absorption, and then I went through a season of crushing anguish in the light of my revealed wickedness. My pursuit of what I wanted and needed had terribly infringed on the dignity of those from whom I sought the gains I fixedly believed I deserved. Being self-seeking made it impossible to consider others’ feelings, or relate to them with genuine respect.

Incidentally, people have sensors for when we are operating for our own interests, and looking out for number one, and nobody likes being treated that way. The irony of course is that we don’t like being dishonored and disregarded but we do that to other humans and imagine, even expect them to receive it well. The result is a slow decay of our relationships and connections and in dire cases, bitter isolation.

But being a human is a difficult thing. We are haunted by the good we know we should do but do not. We try our best but we don’t quite perfectly hit the mark. Even our good deeds often don’t go unpunished. Yet in all these things, we are called to love our neighbors and enemies. But how can we answer this call when our hearts default toward vengeance?

We have to wrestle with our super importance and bring it to submission under the One who can help us live up to the call to humanity.

Since I accepted Jesus Christ to be my Savior and Lord, I’ve been noticing beauty growing from within me. When I used to say I love so and so, it was based on their relation to me, or what I could get from them. This helped me to know who I should expend any effort of demonstrating kindness, politeness, patience, attention and care towards. Then I didn’t have to care about the rest.

To love as humanity is called to love is a very difficult pursuit. Yet it is the most worthy competence that will enable us to satisfy this basic need and craving of every soul. The kind of love we are called to serve one another is not of this world, and it is not of the flesh. Therefore to ever hope to make the world a better place through the power of love, we need the Spirit of Love to come into our thinking and give us a new and true perception of love and purpose for us to love.

As I continue on my pilgrimage, I’ve observed how regularly I am tested on my progress and standing about my living out love wholeheartedly. It’s easy to say I love you when I’m in a good mood, or we’re on good terms but as soon as you cross me, I have an instinctive impulse to let out my teeth and claws, in my case with brooding passive aggression.

The more someone crosses us, we callously cancel them out of the “lovable” quadrant and chuck them in our heart dungeons until they’ve paid in full for their audacity.

For some time now, I’ve been tested on “love does no harm“, and “love keeps no records of wrongs“.

So, we all know we are outright the most forgiving person in the world.

But for me, what the results from my testing revealed was that I was operating in self-deception. Contrary to my self-assessment, I faced the fact that I’d never really forgiven, fully. That’s why I was still causing so much harm to myself and my neighbor.

Often, we can keep a record of the many wrongs done to us without being aware that we have those records buried deep in our souls. But just because we cannot recall them off the top of our heads does not mean they are not festering and evoking torture from our jailers until we completely release and forgive those who inflicted the injury. This is why Dr. Wilkinson’s process of forgiveness is radically transformational in its effect to guide us to complete relinquishment of all our debtor’s charges fully.

When we keep a record of wrongs that happened to us, we are sucking the abundant life from our lives, and producing bad reports about life because we keep using out-of-date records. This is why God can be blessing someone who did something to you and you can’t understand how or why.

But God works with us using the most current information that will never go out of date, and it is this:

The coming of the Son of God into the world was not to condemn it but to save it through atoning for humanity’s trespasses with His blood shed on the cross at Calvary thereby paying all the debt of sin of mankind. In this Jesus Christ purchased forgiveness from God that mankind may forever be free from the penalty due for sin.

This is love.

Selfless. Sacrificial. Sanctifying.

In and of ourselves, we cannot attain to treat every person, at all times with perfect patience, kindness, politeness, humility, honor, consideration, peace, sacrifice, forgiveness, and truth. But because of what Jesus Christ accomplished for humanity forever, any human who chooses to follow Jesus becomes empowered to operate in the Spirit of Love, through which everything that Jesus said and does flows, for the glory of Love.

Choosing to follow Jesus means you get to be in company with him and very soon more and more of him rubs off on you and you begin to live and operate in life in the love that heals and nourishes the souls of everyone we encounter. We are no longer plagued with loving how we know – which is always going to fall short – but we get to love as God loves: inexhaustibly, indiscriminately, and perfectly under grace.

The recent tests I’ve gone through have been opportunities where I’ve experienced what it means and looks like to operate in the power of the Spirit of love. Without God’s Spirit, I am certain I should be estranged from my husband and family because I felt like I had no more love to give.

Yet God’s eternal love living in me, the Holy Spirit deposited into me when I believed in the Son of God and accepted to follow Him boosted me to a level of love for them that is transcendent and much more beautiful.

A love that is patient.

A love that is kind.

A love that is content, polite, and humble.

A love that honors, sacrifices, peaceful, forgives.

A love that is delightfully true and always hopes and perseveres

A love that does no harm.

A love that heals and mends and restores.

A love that makes the world a better place

xoxo

With Love,

Nimi