Lament Forgive: A New Way to Approach Forgiveness

By Steve Hall

Time is a terrible healer. Our memories of the disloyalty, betrayal, or abuse we’ve suffered, keep the pain fresh and the consequences ongoing. No wonder we find forgiving so hard.

Traditionally, Christians view forgiveness as a gift we offer to the people who wrong us, but this fails to communicate anything about how we can receive healing from our mistreatment.

If you and I are going to believe God wants to liberate us from our past and heal our memories, a reframing of what it means to forgive is desperately required.

And to do that, we’re going to need to start in an unexpected place: with the lament.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cookies and Oxygen Publishing
• Release date: Mar 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912403028

Steve Hall

STEVE HALL is a historian, author, novelist and renowned Titanic researcher. He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on her photographic record, having collected, studied and researched the ship for over three decades, and is a recognised authority on the technical aspects of the Olympic-class ships. He is a consultant for media centres, auction houses and museums around the world and is regularly invited to conduct talks with history students. He is a foundation member of the Titanic and Steamship Historical Society of Australia.

Book preview

stated.

PREFACE

Memories of Broken Wings

Out of Egypt they came.

Thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children scurrying away from the nation who had enslaved them. Propelled by an agonising mixture of hope and fear they didn't know which direction to look. Chasing them in an angry cloud of horse and chariot and spear was the army of their Egyptian slave masters. To their left and right giant walls of water ushered them across the sea along an avenue of dry ground. Ahead of them a tantalising glimpse of freedom beckoned.

The longest night of their lives didn’t seem like night-time. In the sky above them glowed a pillar of fire that cast both light and warmth upon them. A pillar of thick cloud moved behind this fire, blocking its light from the Egyptian horde who struggled over the uneven sea floor in darkness.

At dawn the last Israelite stepped onto the sand that represented dry land. Moses stretched out his arm across the sea with only moments to spare. With a mighty roar the walls of water collapsed in an avalanche upon the pursuing army. Not one of them survived.

Shouts of joy filled the early morning air. Music and dancing, songs and laughter, erupted all over the beach in praise of God. They were free!

God had rescued them from Egypt, however, the toll of a lifetime spent as slaves remained clear to see. Whip marks decorated their undernourished bodies, stooped postures showed decades of harsh labour, and down-turned eyes revealed habits of self-preservation.

A missing generation of boys and an absent elderly presence left a visible scar of a different kind.

Other wounds caused by their prolonged captivity lay hidden beneath the surface. We glimpse these only within the silences of the story. When a new Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites with abusive slave masters, no mention is made of them asking God for help. The Egyptians used them ruthlessly and made their lives bitter with harsh labour, yet no prayers for rescue are recorded. Their baby boys are drowned in the Nile and even then—even then—they don’t cry out to God.

In situations of captivity or slavery, a constant cycle of violence and reward turns the captor into the ongoing source of life for the captive. Therefore, only when the Pharaoh dies are we told the Israelites cry out to God for deliverance.

Talk about issues.

The Israelites stand on the beach liberated, yet in desperate need of further liberation.

A little later in their story God says to them:

You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

—Exodus 19:4-6

Really?

A treasured possession? Their time in slavery offered them compelling evidence of their supposed lack of value.

A kingdom of priests? The struggle to invite God into their own lives makes them a surprising choice to minister his presence to others.

A holy nation? The shame of captivity would leave them believing they were unworthy of belonging to a nation set apart to be holy.

God appears to choose the most traumatised people he can to call his own. He then asks them to share his love and presence with the rest of the world.

A world that included their Egyptian persecutors.

It’s an impossible task, unless God can heal the visible and invisible scars left by their experiences of Egypt. Only with such healing can they become people who are confident in their own value, live apart from shame, and can receive love and give it away to others. Maybe God chose these people to show that no matter how others mistreat us, their sin does not have to be the final word in our lives.

We all have our own Egypts, don’t we?

Places of disloyalty where someone has ignored their bond of commitment to us and treated us as a stranger. 

Or places of betrayal where someone treated us as an enemy by harming us or allowing us to come to harm for their own gain.

Or places of abuse where someone has treated us as an object, number, or animal rather than as a person.

We may or may not label our own experiences of being sinned against as strongly as disloyalty, betrayal, or abuse. But whenever an individual, group, nation, corporation, or system relates to us as a stranger, enemy, or object we glimpse Egypt. The influence of this mistreatment lingers on by haunting our memories, forging our identities, and driving the ways we relate to others.

Peter recalled God’s promise from Exodus when he wrote:

"You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood (a kingdom of priests), a holy nation (a holy nation), God’s special belonging (treasured possession), that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness (Egypt) into his wonderful light."

—1 Peter 2:9 with bracketed links to Exodus 19:4-6

In God’s eyes, we are these things already, yet we relate better to the future tense of God’s promise found in Exodus—you will be. This is because suffering causes God’s parental love and our identity as his beloved child, to stay as academic knowledge or mere sentimentality rather than a day-to-day experienced reality. A new story is available to us, but for now we are stuck in a story where someone else's sin defines who we are and how we live.

We are saved but need further saving.

We are like a bird who fell out of the sky after being attacked by a flying predator. This assault left our wings damaged and our perception of the sky’s inherent safety shattered. Unable to fly with the pain of broken wings, we learned how to survive life on the ground. Over time our wings healed, but time has not healed all the damage caused. Unsure how to restore our identity, remove our shame, and end the painful memories—yet certain we do not want to be victimised again—we numb our desire to fly.

The real tragedy is not that we now walk everywhere, it is that we have convinced ourselves staying on the ground is better than flying.

At times of complete desperation or in unguarded moments of reflection, we come to realise how fully our past controls our present. After we acknowledge how we cannot keep walking everywhere, a quiet whisper reminds us we are designed to soar on wings like eagles. We look skywards and feel the yearning to fly once more.

God began healing the Israelites by revealing to them their true identity and he begins there with us too.

We are chosen.

We are treasured.

We are priests.

We are holy.

We are grounded birds being called to fly again.

Only a revelation of who we are meant to be holds the power to inspire us to find the courage and determination to face our darkest memories and deepest shame. We will need to hold this identity close—even if we don’t believe it yet—because when we last faced our hurt we became overwhelmed and numbed our desire for flight. For this time to end in healing, we will need to reclaim knowledge our western culture has lost.

Let us rediscover how to lament and forgive.

CHAPTER 1

Refusing Denial

Nestled after Jeremiah and before Ezekiel is a tiny book of poetry that is easily lost between the huge books either side of it. Just five poems long, the book of Lamentations captures the senseless tragedy and horror of seeing a city destroyed by war.

The city is Jerusalem, and the year is 586 BC. After a year-and-a-half long siege, the army of the Babylonian Empire broke through Jerusalem's gates in a mighty flood of sword and fire. This once glorious city now lies in ruins. Her walls have been torn down, the temple destroyed, and every building set alight. Smoke rises from the ashes like a funeral pyre, burnt bodies litter the streets, and packs of jackals prowl the squares. The majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants have been killed or dragged off by the invaders to become slaves. A severe famine leaves survivors wasting away from hunger and wishing they had died by Babylonian sword.

Lamentations is a bleak account. As you bravely—or dutifully—trudge through these five poems, your spirit longs for a glimpse of hope, a word of prophecy, or a small word of comfort from God. But it never comes. God remains silent. Instead, a handful of overlapping voices draw you in to the shocking aftermath of their individual or corporate experiences of Jerusalem's destruction. Verse after verse overflows with their raw pain, uncontrolled sorrow, and sheer unadulterated desperation.

By the end of Lamentations, part of you is glad it is such a short book while the other part of you is left disturbed by God’s continued distance. The book ends with the following lines:

Why do you always forget us?

Why do you forsake us so long?

Restore to us yourself, LORD, that we may return;

renew our days as of old

unless you have utterly rejected us

and are angry with us beyond measure.

—Lamentations 5:20-22

Imagine a Broadway show where you know who the lead actor is, but his character is neither seen nor heard for the entire duration of the play. The set has been designed to look like the front fascia of this character’s house. As the story progresses, you are given the impression he is home by the way lights inside the house turn on and off at random intervals. The rest of the cast congregate outside in the street. They are dressed in dirty and bloodied rags, with many appearing injured. All of them are starving. Some violent disaster has befallen them before the play began and together they mourn the loss of family, friends, and homes.

The cast obviously feel an attachment to the main character and believe this to be a reciprocal bond, for they spend the next three hours banging on his front door and windows. They speak about him, rage at him, repent to him, praise him, and cry out for his comfort, yet he never opens his door or even looks out a window. He chooses not to join their conversation, answer their accusations, or offer any form of comfort. They are met only with silence and absence.

The play ends with the cast questioning whether they have been abandoned by this lead character and assuming he must be immeasurably angry with them. The curtain falls, but as we walk out of the theatre, we swear we can still hear weeping coming from behind the curtain.

In such a disconcerting story, it's easy to see why we make the following chorus of praise—with its expressions of hope—the traditional focal point of Lamentations:

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion;

therefore I will wait for him."

—Lamentations 3:21-24

However, when we put praise at the heart of Lamentations, we can end up telling each other to respond to trauma with proclamations of hope, rejoicing, or thanksgiving. These are not always healthy responses to encourage. Not only do they suggest that God is uninterested in how we are feeling, they can also belittle our