HOW TO FORGIVE

I attend twice a month on Tuesdays at 7:30 a.m. a Men's Ministry group at my church. They are all a bunch of gray beards, like I am. The diversity of successful backgrounds is amazing: doctors, lawyers, high-powered execs, engineers, priests, Ph.Ds---you get the picture. And they, as a group, don't wear their religion on their sleeves. Some of them, besides me, actually swear on occasions, tell jokes, and take a drink, this last quality being very Episcopal in nature. After all, there's an old saw among Episcopalians that wherever there are four Episcopalians, there's always a fifth!

The meeting theme this morning was "God is Love; therefore, so am I" and "How does God's Love affect our daily lives?" We broke into two groups of six or seven each and discussed this theme at our table, and then a spokesman from each table summarized the discussion. Both groups found that the discussion eventually led to the idea of forgiveness as a paramount aspect of God's Love and how difficult it is for many of us to forgive the hurts inflicted by others, but, the older we get, the more we are able to begin to forgive. As one fellow half-jokingly put it, "Maybe not forgiving takes too much energy for us old guys."

Another fellow, a retired doctor, came up with a concept that he has tried to live by in times of stress, that rang all our bells. He recalled at staff meetings when he would be dealing with some example of incompetence or foul-ups which could drive him up the wall when a nurse said to him, referring to the screw-up, "You've got to remember he (or she) is doing the best he can."

Now, whenever the doctor is driving and some reckless driver cuts him off in traffic, and he feels the spleen beginning to rise, he simply, like a mantra, says over and over to himself, that man is doing the best he can. He says it starts to work on him in a few seconds, and he calms down.

I think he has a point. We are all imperfect beings who screw up regularly and need forgiveness. Is it worth becoming infuriated and letting it ruin our day? Is it worth carrying that old wound around and reopening the wound by scratching at it constantly? Just letting go doesn't mean you'll forget the wound, but it can make living with it a lot easier.

I am going to give this technique a try. Just remember: we're all doing the best we can. Maybe it isn't always good enough, but it's the best we can do.