Burning the Black and White

Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. COLOSSIANS 3:13

It would be easy to leave Corrie ten Boom’s teaching on forgiveness at the dramatic moments — the letter to the informer, the hand held out to a guard. But she did not leave it there, and it is one of the most endearing things about her that she did not. She told audiences, again and again, that she had found it harder to forgive some Christian friends for a comparatively small injury than to forgive the men who had murdered her family. This chapter is about that humbler, daily, unglamorous forgiveness, which is the kind most of us actually need.

Two o’clock in the morning

In The Greatest of These Is Love and The Love of Christ, Corrie tells of a time when some Christian friends did something she felt was mean and unjust. She had difficulty forgiving them. She reasoned with the Lord that if He could give her grace to forgive the murderers of her family, He could certainly give her grace for this. It took some time, but she forgave them, and was glad.

Then she woke at two in the morning and found herself going over it all again — what she had done for these friends, and what they had done to her. The resentment was back. She asked the Lord to take it away, and He did, and she slept. The next night at two o’clock it came again. And the next. By the third night, she says, she was disgusted with herself.

Anyone who has tried to forgive will recognise the pattern. We decide to forgive, and we mean it. And then the injury replays itself in the small hours, with all our old arguments, and we wonder whether we forgave at all.

The bell that keeps ringing

The help came, she says, from an old German minister. He reminded her that when a church bell is rung by hand, the ringer can let go of the rope, but the bell does not stop at once. It swings on, a few more strokes, fainter and fainter, and then it is still. Those last strokes, he told her, do not belong to the ringing; they are only the momentum of it. Her resentment at two in the morning was like that. She had let go of the rope when she forgave. What she was hearing was the old swing dying away. She need not be alarmed by it. She need only tell the Lord that this stroke did not belong to the ringing, and let it fade.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. PHILIPPIANS 3:13–14

The picture is a mercy to anxious consciences. The return of an old feeling does not mean the forgiveness was false. Forgiveness is a decision of the will; feelings have momentum of their own. The Christian who has forgiven and then feels the sting again should not start over in despair. He should recognise the echo, bring it to the Lord, and let it go.

Black and white

But the story did not end there, and the second part is sharper. Corrie tells how, while she was working with John Sherrill on The Hiding Place, he asked her about these friends. She told him the matter was forgiven and forgotten. He asked what the friends themselves thought, and she admitted that they simply denied having done it. But, she added, she had it all in black and white, in letters they had written.

Sherrill’s reply, as she tells it, stopped her. Where were her own sins? Had she not told audiences everywhere that God casts them into the depths of the sea and forbids fishing? Then why was she keeping the evidence of other people’s sins in a drawer? She went home and burned the letters.

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil. 1 CORINTHIANS 13:5

Love, says Paul, keeps no record of wrongs; the Authorised Version puts it that charity thinketh no evil. That is exactly what the letters were: a record, kept in case it should be needed. Corrie had forgiven her friends in principle and preserved the case against them in practice. She urged her hearers not to go to sleep until they had burned their own black and white — or, as she said with a smile to American audiences, torn it up so small that no one could ever read it.

God who forgets

The model for this is God Himself.

I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins. ISAIAH 43:25

God does not lose His memory. He chooses not to bring our sins up again, not to hold them against us, not to keep the file open. That is what it means for Him to remember them no more.

And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. HEBREWS 10:17

We are to forgive even as He forgave us. That means not only releasing the debt but closing the file. It does not mean pretending nothing happened, or never speaking of it where speaking is necessary for truth or safety. But it does mean giving up the private archive of grievances that we keep against the day we might need it.

He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that repeateth a matter separateth very friends. PROVERBS 17:9

Why the small ones are harder

Why should it be harder to forgive friends than enemies? Corrie did not analyse it, but her story suggests an answer. We expect nothing from enemies, so their wrongs, however terrible, do not surprise us. We expect loyalty from friends, and their small betrayals wound our pride as well as our hearts. And the great wrongs drive us to God because we know we cannot handle them. The small ones we think we can manage ourselves, and so we never quite bring them to Him.

And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. 1 PETER 4:8

Most of the forgiving any of us will ever be asked to do is of this second kind: a colleague’s slight, a relative’s thoughtlessness, a church member’s unkindness, a friend’s broken promise. Corrie’s honesty about her own struggles here is part of what makes her teaching believable. She never claimed to have mastered forgiveness. She claimed only that God had helped her when she could not help herself, and that He had to do so again and again.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name a small, old grievance against a friend or fellow Christian that still replays in your mind. Forgive it again today, in your will.

2. When the feeling returns this week, recognise it as the bell swinging on. Tell the Lord it does not belong, and let it fade.

3. Do you keep black and white — letters, messages, screenshots, a mental list — of other people’s wrongs? Destroy what you can, unless it is genuinely needed for safety or justice.

4. Read 1 Corinthians 13 slowly and note each phrase that describes how love treats the wrongs of others.

5. Ask God whether there is someone you have forgiven in principle but not yet in practice, and what one step would close the file.

A PRAYER

Lord, You have blotted out my transgressions and will not remember my sins. I keep far better records than You do.

Forgive me for the files I have kept against my friends, and for the case I have been quietly preparing.

When the old resentment rings again in the night, let me know it for an echo, and give it to You.

Teach me the love that thinketh no evil, and make me as ready to forget as You have been to forget me. Amen.