On Forgiveness

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“You can’t forget,” says RLP of forgiveness, “Forgiving has nothing to do with forgetting.”

Read the whole thing.

It is a hard, humbling struggle, to forgive — really, really, forgive — more so in the case of those who think they have done nothing wrong. Not only does forgiveness mean the decision to no longer be hurt when you think about it; it means choosing to stop wishing the offender would feel remorse, choosing to wish for that person’s happiness, choosing to face the hurt and anger head-on, and answer it with peace, joy, and love.

A few things I have learned along that path:

  1. The cliché holds true: Time does heal wounds. The Dane told me that it would eventually not suck, and sure enough, it eventually not sucked. (I did, however, have to humbly recant my boast that I easily “bounce back.” It was mere self-assured arrogance which rang completely false when faced with an actual emotional crisis.)
  2. I think the crisis gave me a taste of how my parents must have felt when I moved out of the house years ago. Being abruptly left by someone you love leaves you bitter and angry, and feelings of vindictiveness and abandonment push forgiveness clear out of your mind. That my parents still love me now means much more to me than it used to, now that I have been through a resonant pain.
  3. Does God feel hurt and anger the same way we do? Is that how God must feel for his children, turned astray, every single one of us, departing from his righteousness every day, many, many times a day, often knowing that we do wrong, yet persisting in sin anyway? If I am pained and angered to distraction over the comparably petty issue of a broken romance, how much more wrath does an infinite God feel over his creation’s stubborn rebellion? Only an infinite forgiveness could cover over such anger completely; such an infinite forgiveness as was gained for us at the Cross. By knowing what it is to be wronged, and to forgive, I realized just how powerful a force is Grace.

I found this sentence at the bottom of my “things to blog” .txt file yesterday. I have no idea when I came up with it; but I do know that many wounds were healed with its writing:

My place now is to be in prayer and thanksgiving, bouyed everyday by the knowledge that the pain of failed love — and even the joy of love renewed — are pale, empty things in the light of the peace and joy given to us by our Lord and Savior.

And that’s all I need say about that.

More OS X Freeware

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A couple of freeware OS X utilities which have served me well these past few weeks:

  • RBrowserLite, FTP client. Somehow, Cyberduck and LiFTP weren’t cutting it for me, but this has worked a bit better. RBrowser Lite’s interface is a bit cluttered, but it transfers files, and that’s what really matters.
  • R-Name, batch file renamer. Since I’m too lazy to figure out the single line batch file rename script in Darwin, and since ABFR costs money, R-Name will do. The author suggests a donation to UNICEF for the use of his software. Sounds good. Note that you must use File > Open to get files to rename before you do anything else. That was a bit confusing at first.
  • (Oh, and of course, The Application Formerly Known As Hydra, now SubEthaEdit, has been an excellent code editor, and the collaborative functions are icing on the cake.)

QuikTrakNT

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WinNT-powered QuikTrak machine at Baltimore Penn Station flashes a crash screen. Oops.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.

On Earthquakes

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Earthquake hits Northern Japan. Magnitude 8.0 is pretty strong, but with the epicenter of the quake located so far below the surface, there seems to have been less injury and damage to Hokkaido than I thought there would be.

I was deadly scared of earthquakes as a child, partly owing to the influence of Superman, the Movie. Seeing the planet Krypton breaking up, and later, Lois Lane’s car falling into that crack in the ground, and that school bus careening off the Golden Gate Bridge — it was a bit much for an impressionable little first-grader living in San Francisco. I was constantly afraid of cracks opening up in the earth and swallowing me alive. Having a home near the airport, with all the low bass rumbling that entailed, did not help. And neither did that 6.2 tremor in 1984. Nor all that talk about “The Big One.” Even years later, the 1990 Luzon earthquake was more frightening to me than I thought it should have been to a high-schooler, and I was distinctly annoyed at myself that my knees continued to shake long after the ground had stopped.

Another earthquake that left an impression on me was the Alaska earthquake of 1964, a whopping 9.2’er. No, I did not experience it firsthand, as I had yet to be born, but I had read a personal account of the quake and the ensuing landslides in one of our texts for Grade School English reading class. Having no visuals, the story had less impact on me than the Superman Movie, but I am still floored whenever I see photos of the damage caused. It was precisely that kind of destruction — houses tossed into huge chasms like toys, huge masses of land shifting and rising and sinking — which had me cowering as a child, wondering if our house would be next.

Last time I was in a major earthquake was in December 1999. It jolted me out of bed, and, quite forgetting to grab a flashlight or any other supplies, I managed to get halfway out of my Parañaque apartment before the lights went out. Fortunately the shaking stopped around the same time, the lights came back on, and nothing had been damaged. I don’t think I was quite as paralyzed with fear as I had been in my Superman-trauma days.

For now, I live in a place with relatively little earthquake history, and I think I should be able to handle a major earthquake with a fair amount of calm. (We’ll see if that still applies while the brick walls come a-tumbling down. Knock on wood.)

And though the ground may move beneath my feet, literally or proverbially, I pray yet that the kingdom within my soul be not shaken. I know that I have not refused him whose voice shook the earth.

Bargain

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Heh. Religion books at bargain prices, B&N, Arlington, VA.

Photo taken with a Palm Zire 71.