Don't underestimate God's propensity to make use of the Nuclear Option in our lives to set us straight.Were it not for what I call a "grace grenade" bouncing into my room and blowing out the windows of my life as I knew it, I'm not sure what things would look like today.
I had met a photographer while biking across the country in the summer of 2003, fallen in love, and gotten engaged a few months later. In some ways, she was a little wilder than my usual "type"--a talented artist, covered in tattoos and who was featured in tattoo magazines, who trained at a South Philly boxing club, trading exotic dancing in a strip club for bartending in an iconic 15th Street dive bar--while in some ways we were too much alike.
The wedding was set for September of 2004, the deposit was put down at the reception venue, the guests were invited, the shower gifts received. I remember many times saying to myself and others, "relationships are supposed to be hard. They're supposed to be hard." The truth is, we weren't right for one another, and I was an incredible burden at the time, my depression thick as a fog.
We kept pushing on, gritting through, but truth be told the whole thing needed to be blown up. And blow up it did under the stresses of circumstance. Her photography career was taking off on a national level while her best friend was diagnosed with and succumbing to cancer. Meanwhile she was juggling dealing with my mental state and, I presume, having doubts about her ability to endure me for the rest of our lives together. At one point she confessed she had gone home with someone from the bar and contracted an STD in the process.
The news, of course, cut like a knife. I could tell she was sorry, but it was also a clear sign that she wanted out; this would not be something we would be walking back from. The hurt was so weighty, it felt like at the time, that when I held her sobbing in my arms it was clear I had no natural strength to forgive this infidelity. I was numb, but I made an act of the will to turn it over to the Big Guns to do the forgiving for me. After all, had I not played the whore with the Lord, been his Gomer, and been washed clean by his own blood? Who was I to withhold forgiveness for such harlotry? It was the same Holy Spirit who at the basement hardcore show when I was 17 had "cut me to the heart" and convicted in my sin who then stepped in and gave me the grace to forgive my fiancee, with no residual of contempt or bitterness. I simply forgave her, washed away by mercy, and let her go. It was one hundred and ten percent grace.
God doesn't keep us from making mistakes, especially those of youthful folly. But in lobbing this "grenade of grace" that derails our dearest plans, sending downed trees into one trailhead so that we take another instead, he gently makes use of our tangled circumstances for His glory and our good and brings us to the place He wants us to end up. He's not opposed to opening up the arsenal and using whatever is needed--tragedy, sickness and death, betrayal, crisis--to break our hearts of stone, reshape us by grace, and bring us home.
Pastor Wang Yi spoke in this video of how he approaches police interrogations (for living the faith in China) which I think speaks to this technique of backing yourself into a corner on purpose before you can second-guess, and "settling matters quickly" with your adversary (Mt 5:25).
"When I'm being interrogated at a police station, I put myself in a 'spiritually safe' situation...I say everything front. I immediately arrive at the point of no return...
When you are facing pressure because of your faith, don't give yourself to much wiggle room. Articulate the most controversial point as early as possible, and then with Esther say "If I die, I die." It is often those who say "If I die, I die" who live in the end."
That relationship of mine twenty years ago was a disaster, and it needed to be blown up. And of course he not only blew it up, but sent the wife he had been reserving for me years as a provision years later.
But I never forgot that experience of God's mercy for my then-fiance through the conduit of my own broken spirit. I willed forgiveness, and in the daze when I felt myself losing consciousness and going down, turned it over to Him to exact it. It was bigger than I could do myself. I backed my will into a corner of forgiveness, because if I did not right then and there, I would doubt I ever could. I would brood and fester, reliving the hurt, licking wounds and lording it over her for years to come.
Instead, I just....let it go. Let the Lord deal with the mess. I'll do my part--"forgive those who trespass against you..." just as I had been forgiven my trespasses. I had no dogshit of resentment stuck to the soles of my shoes, no anger. God had wiped everything clean in my heart after that moment. In that, I myself healed, while never forgetting that that kind of power does not come from the human heart, but by grace.
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