Jesus challenged his friends to forgive people seven times seventy which essentially means that we’re never freed from forgiving those who have offended us.
I wonder, though, in a time and culture where we are so incredibly mobile, where few work at the same job their whole lives and even fewer live in the same home their whole life, and where rootedness is a forgotten value if we ever rub shoulders with the same people enough to ever need to forgive someone seventy times. While I understand the metaphorical nature of Jesus’ statement it strikes me that very few of us stay in the same place long enough or put down roots deep enough to ever need to truly believe Jesus’ wild invitation. Who ever sticks around a person or place that needs that much forgiveness?!
Is it harder to forgive or to stay put? Is it harder to forgive or to know your neighbors? Hmm, I wonder.
While I think that I’ve created a false dichotomy, I still think it’s worth wrestling with. When someone offends you on Facebook what do you do? You defriend them, you remove them from your virtual world. When a barista at a cafe offends you what do you do? You go to a different coffee shop. When life starts to feel to bloated with all that crappy life stuff what do we do? We move, get a new job, a new house, etc. Being able to move, to relocate, and explore new areas is a gift, but it might be a gift that we’ve drank too deeply of. Are we a culture that’s drunk on change, newness, and mobility? And does that drunken state preclude us from the gift of forgiveness?
(Thanks to Mark Scandrette’s book “Practicing the Way of Jesus” for developing some of these thoughts)
Listening might just be the best thing we can do to care for another. There are so few people in this world who are willing to listen. We all want to be heard but few of us want to hear. A phrase that emerged out of my schooling experience was “listening people into free speech”. Beautiful. That’s an experiment that many of us should step up to, listening people into free speech.
A little over a year ago a group of people from the neighborhood met in our living room to dream about what our neighborhood could be. We dreamed about how neighbors could connect with neighbors, how neighbors could dream together, and how new things could emerge. It was a great dialog but honestly I don’t remember many specific things from it. The one thing I remember clearly is that after we had got to know each other, dreamed together, and decided that we’d each go back to our neighborhood in order to ‘make a difference’ Oso stood up and somewhat incredulously said “well that sucks. I just got to know all of you (few of us had ever met Oso before this night) and now we’re saying that I won’t see you again? That sucks. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want friends, I want more of this!”