May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. — Romans 15:5-6

I came across a blog today that grieves and saddens me. I’ve seen its kind before. Someone, or a group of someones, hurt by the actions of a brother or sister in Christ, or a church staff, or a group within the church, puts up a blog to air their grievances and give others a chance to do the same in the comments section.  Once or twice, these become a place where healing is the goal and bitterness does not go unchecked. But more often than not, these blogs end up as nothing more than a place of condemnation for the pastor or staff member at fault for the pain.  It becomes a chance for anyone hurt by that person or group of people to defame them under the pretense of "telling their story." Sadly, the blog I found this morning is the latter kind.

I know the pain of emotional and spiritual injury at the hands of another, especially injury caused by a friend. Its sting carries venom powerful and deadly. Only the compassionate, gracious, all-consuming love of God can heal that kind of wound and restore health to the soul.  Even then it leaves a scar.

Emotional/spiritual injury by a pastor can be worse. A friend of mine says that pastors are also a "dad" to their church.  It’s not a role they want, or seek. Nor is it a role we consciously put upon them. Its just that we all naturally end up looking to our pastor to fill a father-like role in our lives; leading, guiding, counseling, loving, appreciating, paying attention to us, knowing us. We want to be known by our pastors, and recognized as valuable, valued and worthy of love. All the things we want from our fathers. When a pastor doesn’t live up to that expectation, unconscious or not, especially in a time of need, it feels like the worst kind of betrayal, that of a parent.  If we’re already suffering from major "daddy issues", and most of us are, that betrayal can cut to the heart of who we are and devastate us.

When the injury is at the hands of a friend who’s also our pastor, the pain is unimaginable. This is what I found this morning.  What grieves me most about it is that it involves people I know, respect, and love deeply.  I discovered it because I keep getting multiple hits on this blog from people Googling the blog author’s name and finding it here, in a post from two years ago.  As I read the ensuing comments, the vitriolic tone of many pierced my heart to its core. I knew there had been hurt, I lived through the experiences they described, but it didn’t occur to me that some six to ten years later people would still be carrying around such rancor over it all.

Forgiveness is the hardest thing on earth to do. Our souls long for retribution, for repayment for all the pain we’ve had to endure.  I know. I’m the worst when it comes to forgiving. God has had to walk with me through each and every injury, sometimes carrying me, in order for my heart to finally let go and forgive.

It’s important to remember that forgiveness is a process. It’s a choice you make. And make. And make again. Until the hurt and anger lessens, your heart stops making an automatic left turn into dark places, and your thoughts stop running down avenues of revenge. It doesn’t happen overnight. And it often doesn’t even happen within a month.  Depending on the level of pain inflicted and the measure of trust that had been placed in the person who hurt you, it could be years before forgiveness truly flourishes.

Matthew 18 spells out the steps Jesus expects us to take to resolve things when we are injured, the last step being to treat the offending brother as if he were an unbeliever if he refuses to listen to even the church’s rebuke. How many of us actually go through with these steps? How many times to we just give up and just walk away from the relationship when the hurt and anger grows too big for us to handle? I know I’m guilty. Its just easier to tell ourselves, and anyone else who’ll listen, how horrible the other person was and how grievously they wronged us, rather than to screw our courage to the sticking place, and go face-to-face with the other person for as long as it takes us to understand their side of the story. No, it’s easier to just cling to our own side and ignore the rest; to never confront the person in the presence of fair-minded witnesses, if we even confront them at all.

But what Matthew 18 never tells us to do is to air our grievances before the world; in the town square, or the main boulevard, or even in a city park.  Yet here we are, blogs all over the virtual town square/boulevard known as the Internets, airing grievances of brother-in-Christ against brother-in-Christ. Defaming our brothers and sister in the name of Christ and claiming a Matthew 18 mandate to do so.

Yikes!  No wonder so many reject the very idea of becoming a follower of Jesus. We eat our own.

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you." C.S. Lewis 

Go ahead and be angry. You do well to be angry—but don’t use your anger as fuel for revenge. And don’t stay angry. Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life…  Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive one another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you. — Eph 3:26-27,31-32