Protecting Love and Trust In the Valley of Hurt and Disappointment

“Oh, how can I ever forgive,

When they have hurt and disappointed me so?”

Plead with God to protect your love and trust;

He’ll give you everything else you need to grow.

FORGIVENESS is surrounded by so much hype on the one hand and by so much mystery on the other. I’m sure the people who don’t get it use it as a platitude (“really, you must just forgive them!”) whilst those who do get it understand how mysterious a thing forgiveness is. The things of God are mysterious – that is my deduction having travelled the Christian journey. So many things of life and faith and growth are total mysteries that occur by God’s Spirit. They cannot be explained. I’m very happy with this. I’m so glad ‘his ways’ are eternally beyond my ways! I’m thrilled that ‘his ways’ work, whilst mine do not – such a truth compels my faith forward. Forgiveness is such a thing.

I learned to forgive by trusting God through a journey of marital betrayal – to be cast aside for another to take my place. I lost everything. That’s how it felt at the time. (But it no longer feels that way at all – only God can transform such understandings.) Only God could have helped save my love for my former wife – the one I trusted with my life – the one I never contemplated would fall in love with another. Only God could have held my heart open to her. And such was God’s work in me, I was able to forgive him who came into my family. In time, God was able to help me to truly embrace him. God made it possible for me to love my betrayers – and yet I still cannot explain the process; but I can proclaim how to obey God and I can herald the outcome!

Ask God to protect your love for the one who’s hurt you. Ask God to protect your trust for the one who’s disappointed you. In such things is the basis for forgiveness. For, if our forgiveness is dependent on love and trust, as it so often is, then we must pray for such things to be protected.

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God protects our love and our trust of the one who’s hurt and disappointed us, if ask him, and then do what he says. Forgiveness is the supernatural outcome of having such love and trust protected. Only God can help. Seek him today.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.