Captain's Corner

I have a confession to make. Until very recently I had list of people I wanted to kill.

Seriously.

It was a very short list, but it existed nonetheless. The people on the list had at some point done something that deserved punishment… deserved “justice” as I liked to think of it. Oddly enough none of them had wronged me directly… they’d simply made the mistake of harming the people I love. I was sure that, were I ever to come face to face with these individuals, I would suddenly and without provocation burst forth in “righteous anger” and provide said “justice”.

About 19 weeks ago my thinking began to change. I didn’t realize it at first… I mean having a baby changed the way I thought about so many every day things that it took a while for this particular topic to surface. Then I went to the movies.

I saw “Death Sentence”… it was a terribly clichéd piece (and a remake to boot) wherein a man watches his son being murdered senselessly by gang members during an initiation. He decides 3-5 years isn’t long enough for his son’s murder to be in prison, so he refuses to testify and instead tracks the guy down and kills him.

Nineteen weeks ago I would have been okay with this. However, when I saw “Death Sentence”, I was pretty far from okay. My mind screamed at me, “Doesn’t this moron realize he has a wife and another son at home he has to protect?” You see, God always starts working on me from this angle, because he knows it’s one of the things I am most fiercely passionate about. For the first time in my life it became glaringly obvious to me that to take such actions would merely lead to the destruction of my own life. I would either get caught and be taken away from my family for the rest of my life, or I get away with it and live with the knowledge of what I had done for the rest of my life.

Back to the movie–when the father realizes the gang leader (and the brother of the man he just killed) is coming after him, he doesn’t move his family out of town. Instead he waits until the men break into his home and kill his wife in front of him and wind up putting his son in a coma. Then he “finishes what he started”. The movie ends with him bleeding nearly to death, sitting next to the gang leader (who does bleed to death) after they have shot each other full of holes. The gang leader turns and looks at the dad and says, “Look at you. You look like one of us. Look what I made you become.”

In the end his life was no better than it was if he had just testified and let the punk go to jail. In fact, it was much, much worse. All he had to do was forgive the person who had wronged him and he could have started healing.

That’s when it hit me. Our version of “justice” is warped by the sin in this world, in our lives. We are so wrapped up in ourselves that justice becomes what rights the wrongs done against us and our tribe, but not what rights the wrongs we’ve committed. Mercy is an attribute of weakness and justice is the mark of the strong.

But that’s just not right. Mercy in our lives should come from the overflow of mercy that God has already shown us. It doesn’t matter who was on my list or what they had done to me or mine–what they did was no worse than what I have done (and at times continue to do) to my Creator. I deserved no less than eternal separation from God and torment. That is true justice for the wrongs I have committed and yet God took pity on me, gave me a way out of my situation, and set me free. Who am I to turn around and refuse forgiveness, harbor hate, and indeed plan further wrongdoings? And worse still, to somehow justify them and consider said actions the “right thing to do”?

God freely gave me forgiveness–I could never earn it. How then could I stand firm on “what was due me” when God gave up all His rights just to restore me to Him? The answer–I can’t. Oddly enough I thought I had already forgiven these individuals and that I was merely willing to fulfill the role of “God’s justice”. In truth, I had never fully forgiven, because to truly forgive is to give up all claims to rights of reparations, restitution, and restoration.

Now I have forgiven. Those of you on the list may go in peace.

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