Making Peace

Making Peace
Week 4; Day4 Thursday

Funeral and memorial services are tough on family members. At a loved one’s death, we rejoice in the hope of heaven, but we also feel our own mortality more than ever. We wonder if we had sufficiently said our peace. Have grudges been resolved and disappointments been forgiven? Could we have done something to shave the distance that still existed between us? A helplessness sets in as the end nears.

But there is also a warm, enveloping blanket of God’s grace over this all. We feel our own mortality, see someone else’s, and yet somehow there is an ability to accept, as the Serenity Prayer has it, “what we cannot change.”

The only regret we may have is: Why didn’t we come to this realization sooner? Why do we have to be near the end before we can let go? We apply God’s grace and forgiveness at the end because we don’t have a choice; we need to learn how to do this while we do have a choice.

Forgiveness is about letting go. Those who don’t forgive are the ones who find themselves mired in their own hostility and blame, headed toward becoming the very thing they hate. We think we are setting the other person free by forgiving, but we are really doing ourselves the biggest favor. Forgiveness becomes for us a sigh of relief- a newfound freedom.

The Serenity Prayer, by Reinhold Niebuhr, and popularized through Alcoholics Anonymous movement, is a fitting prayer for living like you were dying.

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.

Part of what we cannot change is what others have done to us. Part of what we can change is to forgive them and release them from our judgment. It takes courage, but we have to forgive in order to be at peace with others and ourselves. We can forgive. We can let it go. And the sooner we do this, the better. Don’t wait until someone’s deathbed, or your own.

Many people do not realize that the Serenity Prayer doesn’t end there. The rest of the prayer may not be as well known as the first four lines, but it is well suited for our study.

Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;

Taking, as He did, this sinful world

As it is, not as I would have it;

Trusting that He will make all things right

If I surrender to his will;

That I may be reasonably happy in this life

And supremely happy with Him

Forever in the next.

Amen.

This is the essence of forgiveness: surrender of our expectations, our rights, and our pride to God’s will; giving him control in our lives and trusting that he has our best in mind in all circumstances. Some of you are trapped in the hold of a particularly helpless form of unforgiveness, because the person you are unwilling to forgive is no longer alive. You can’t find peace, because you can’t go to them, nor can they release you. But God can release you, in fact, he already has. All that remains is for you to believe him and let it go. So let it go, and step into the freedom of God’s forgiveness, both for you and for the person you need to forgive. It’s your choice now.