Way back when Harry Truman was president, and particularly when he was on his so-called "whistle-stop" tours, when he spoke, people would call out, "Give 'em hell, Harry!" To which the president replied, he was just telling the truth, and people thought it was hell.
I think of that when "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" comes into my consciousness. My life got simpler when I realized that as "Forgiveness is mine, saith the Lord."
We seek God's help in making her pay for her bad behavior toward us, and there he goes, walking away seemingly free as a lark. Our answered prayer is the Lord's gift of forgiveness of our perceived enemy, but, as long as we stay in our reasoning-mind world, it will feel like vengeance toward us. Forgiveness goes entirely against our ego-victory reasoning mind. Forgiveness to the ego means, "They got away with it."
To me forgiveness is just another word for surrender. And we all know what surrender means...it means we lost. We did not win. We got clobbered...snookered...skunked. The trick is, the sooner we accept...not resign ourselves to, but accept...our own worst possible meaning of that word surrender, the sooner we are freed of its personal stigma and our need to fight it (thus nurturing it by holding it closer). Only then can we experience a new freedom, a new light pouring from within, a new life.
As long as we stay in the belief that the Lord's idea of vengeance is the same as our idea of vengeance, we keep ourselves bound to vitriol, imaginings of payback, hate...outward and inward, despair...all acts of the ego-victory reasoning mind of which the Lord knows naught.
Again, and yet again, and still again: We must go beyond reason to love.
Thank you.
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