Have you been told statements like this?
Forgive and forget.
Forgiving is something you do for you.
Wouldn’t it be good if the whole family was together?
Be a team player.
Let bygones be bygones.
Don’t be a trouble maker.
It would be nice if all of our broken relationships were made perfect. Instead of wishing all of our relationship problems to be solved what if you just focused on restoring one relationship? Even if just for one relationship, ignoring reality isn’t the path to restoration. Being guilted or manipulated to go with the flow so that someone else’s false view of a wonderful world can continue in bliss does not promote healing. It doesn’t feel right when someone expects us to let it go. Letting it go does not give credence to the real harm that has been done. Letting it go violates the love we must give to ourselves to put in place protections from toxic people. I had a teacher in school who used to say; fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. This statement is true because if someone does wrong and you fail to respond by putting appropriate boundaries in place to protect yourself, others and the things that you are a steward of, then you have now done wrong. It is not loving for others to ignore the wrong done or to ask you to remove the boundaries that you wisely put in place in response to the wrong. Even when we have been wronged it is our responsibility to forgive. When we have wronged someone, it is our responsibility to seek reconciliation.
I am a big advocate of proper boundaries. I am also a big advocate of emotional health. Your boundaries and your emotional health can both be cared for in the process of a relationship being restored. Here is a simple plan for reconciliation. It is as easy as 1, 2, 3.
1 Reason for reconciliation
- When you have wronged someone the right thing to do is to seek reconciliation. God has commanded that we reconcile with those who have something against us.
2 Requirements to achieve reconciliation
- Repentance
- Restitution
3 Goals of reconciliation
- Trust
- Respect
- Love
Trust and Respect
To reconcile something is to make it right and restore it to a whole condition. Of the many atrocities that have been and are currently being committed I will bring up a couple. There is a nation that had a policy of removing children from indigenous families. The intent of the policy was to assimilate the indigenous people into white culture and over time to make them white. The stated purpose of this assimilation was to protect a people who were believed to be dying off. Between 1905 and 1967 tens of thousands of children were forcibly removed from their mothers and fathers. This nation is Australia and the children stolen were of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent. How do you make something like this right? In 2018 at least 678,000 children suffered abuse in the United States. How do you make something like this right? The people of my country, the United States, engaged in buying perhaps as many as 450,000 people stolen from Africa and enslaving them as laborers. How do you make something like this right? These are ridiculously large issues but it doesn’t take much of a problem in our own lives to create a situation that seems beyond reconciliation. Many parents, children and siblings are estranged from each other due to offenses that need to be no more than perceived to produce real enmity. The workplace is filled with grudges. Marriages fall apart due to unreconcilable differences. Every one of us have had some wrong done to us by another person resulting in a broken relationship. A person in a broken relationship can feel as if they are in a pit which cannot be climbed out of. The way out of the pit is to rebuild trust and respect. The first step is for the person wronged to put proper boundaries in place that allows them to live in a place of safety and peace. Boundaries are not put in place to punish the wrong doer. They are to protect the wronged. The second step is also with the person who was wronged. They must forgive. I talk about this in the article The exception to forgiving. The link to it is at the bottom of this article. Now it is time for the person who committed the wrong to act by repenting. Trust is built when a person acts consistently with their repentance. Acting in this way shows good character. Good character earns respect. Respecting another person’s boundaries shows love. When you have wronged someone and they put up a boundary to keep you at a distance you must not push against it to try to get them to remove it. This shows that you do not respect the other person as an individual who is separate from you and you are not loving them. As trust and respect are built, the person wronged sees that they can prudently and safely move their boundaries. Given sufficient time and love, the boundaries can be removed. There is a catch here that we all need to be aware of. When any of us puts up a relational boundary, we do not tell the other person what we have done. This means if a person puts up a boundary to keep us safely away from them, we are likely to push up against it and not like the cold shoulder. This is when the people who put up boundaries have things turned upside down on them and they get blamed for the relationship falling apart. If you put up a boundary and are receiving grief for it, I believe it is best to share the existence of the boundary with a trusted person who can inform the person who wronged you about the boundary. If you sense that someone has pulled away from you it is time to tune in and be sensitive. A good place to start is to think over what wrong you could have committed. If you can’t come up with something ask directly or through a trusted third party what wrong you have committed.
Repentance and Restitution
Can the Aborigines, abused children, descendants of African slaves, and you and I just forgive and forget so that relations between the wronged and those who committed the wrong can be restored? When a wrong has been committed the relationship between the people involved changes. There is a loss of trust and respect among many other effects. This is why saying sorry doesn’t fix the problem. Sorry doesn’t create trust or respect. I believe that reconciliation requires repentance. Repentance is thought by some to be the act of saying sorry but this is a misunderstanding. Wikipedia describes repentance as the activity of reviewing one’s actions and feeling contrition or regret for past wrongs, which is accompanied by commitment to and actual action that show and prove a change for the better. Repentance is accompanied by change. This change can rebuild trust and respect over time. There are situations where the action required to make something right is restitution or compensation. The paying of restitution or compensation may make something right but it certainly doesn’t restore trust or respect. The reason “to forgive and forget” does not cause reconciliation is because it takes real action to build trust and respect. It is right for a person who has been wronged to set up a boundary that defines what it means to be safe from the person who committed the wrong. When the wronged person sees that the perpetrator has changed, they can carefully alter the boundary to let the person who wronged them closer so that they can test sincerity and judge whether true change has occurred.
To sum this up-
Have you been wronged? Forgive the person who wronged you, set up appropriate boundaries, and stick to them.
Have you wronged someone? It is your responsibility to seek reconciliation at a speed which the person wronged feels and believes is safe.
This is the sixth article out of six in this series on relationships. The previous articles can be found by clicking on these links. Perhaps you care for someone who can benefit from your sharing these with them.
4 reasons why relationships end
Social Distances – How close of a friend are you?
Reconciliation
That’s all for now. Peace and love fellow traveler,
Jim