“Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil
speaking be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one
another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ
forgave you.”
(Eph 4:31-32)
He was a man nobody liked--hard, sullen, taciturn,
and sour. If you met him on the street and wished him good-day, he
would keep his eyes straight in front of him, grunt sulkily and pass
on. He lived in a tumbled-down old hut away back in the bush. He
spoke to nobody, and he made it perfectly plain that he wished
nobody to speak to him. Even the children shunned him.
Some said he was a hermit; some that he was a miser;
some that he was a woman-hater; some that he was a fugitive from
justice, a man with a guilty secret. But they were all wrong. The
simple truth was that in his youth a companion had done him a
grievous injury. ``I'll remember it to my dying day,'' he hissed, in
a gust of passionate resentment.
And he did. But when his dying day actually came, he
realized that the rankling memory of that youthful wrong had soured
and darkened his whole life. ``I've gone over it by myself every
morning,'' he moaned, as he lay gasping in his comfortless shanty,
``and I've thought of it every night. I've cursed him a hundred
times each day. I see now,'' he added brokenly, a suspicion of
moisture glistening in his eye, ``that my curses have eaten out my
soul; they've been like gall on my tongue and gravel in my teeth. My
hate has hurt nobody but myself. But it's turned my life into gloom
and misery!'' It was true.
The man at whom he had spat out his venomous
maledictions, having done all a man could do to atone for the
suffering that he had thoughtless caused, had dismissed the matter
from his mind a generation back. Upon him the gnarled old man's
bitterness had produced little or no effect. It was the man who
cherished the sinister memory who suffered most. It shadowed his
life; it lent a new terror to death; it expelled every trace of
brightness and excluded every ray of hope; and at last, a grim and
ghostly companion, it lay down with him in his cold and cheerless
grave.
May we each learn the healing power of forgiveness --
before it is too late!
Other Articles
The Apostles
and Hermeneutics
When do the Tears Stop?
The Power of Simplicity
Bible Baptism