And the Journey Begins - June 2011

Forgive: to cease to blame or hold resentment against; to grant pardon for

Unforgivable: so bad as to be unable to be excused or pardoned

Colossians 3:12-14, NIRV You are God’s chosen people. You are holy and dearly loved. So put on tender mercy and kindness as if they were your clothes. Don’t be proud. Be gentle and patient.  Put up with each other. Forgive the things you are holding against one another. Forgive, just as the Lord forgave you.  And over all of those good things put on love. Love holds them all together perfectly as if they were one.
Obviously, nothing my stepmother has done or continues to do is truly unforgivable, according to Christ.  As God’s chosen one, I have been forgiven; I have been granted a pardon for every wrong, past, present, and future, so I must cease to blame or hold resentment against this woman.  Even more, I am supposed to love her.  At this moment in time, I can’t even find a shred of love in my heart for her, because all the memories I’ve held on to for all these years are the negative ones – all the pain, the anger, the injustice, the resentment…I just can’t understand WHY she does the things she does or what I did wrong to deserve any of it.  So, before I can try to find positive feelings for her, I have to deal with all the negatives bombarding my mind.  WARNING: I am not going to sugar-coat or gloss over anything that happened between us, and my words may not be kind or gentle through this part of the journey; I may offend, irritate, & whine, and I have no idea how long this phase will take.  I plan to speak my heart about my past and my childhood (as it relates to her) in order to truly forgive every bit of resentment that I’m holding on to.  This is only one side of the story, the only perspective you are getting is mine.  I will not use her name, because most who know me have no idea who she is and I want to respect her anonymity.  With all that said, I’m going to start at the beginning…
My biological parents divorced when I was three, and one of my earliest memories is of the day my mother left my father.  I remember him crying, me trying to console him, and not understanding at all what was going on.  In fact, the only memory I can think of right now that is from before that day is of my dad taking me into his Frito-Lay truck when he got home from work and letting me choose a treat.  He was a driver for Frito-Lay at the time, and I was completely enthralled at the sight of all those treats.  I thought my daddy must love me A LOT to let me choose whatever I wanted from that huge variety!  I don’t remember what I chose, but I do remember the love I felt.  It was as intense as the heartbreak I could see in my dad the day my mom left.  Not long after that day, my dad and I went to live with his sister, my Aunt Virginia.  My mom and dad both remarried when I was 4, and I remember being passed back and forth between them a lot.  My mom’s new husband was an abusive, drug-dealing pedophile, and my memories of the two of them are memories that I wish I could bleach away. My memories of my step-mom during that time, however, are few.  I do remember being in a church nursery for their wedding, not even knowing they were getting married until after it was over & I was playing with cousins at the reception – they were the ones who told me why there was a party & about the wedding they had attended.  I was too young then to be offended that I wasn’t a part of or even invited to the ceremony, but as I got older, it became, in my mind, the starting point of her removing me from the family.  Once they were married, I remember the trailer we lived in, the way she got mad at me for picking the raisins out of my cereal and eating them separately, and the fights they had behind closed doors.  I remember the day my Aunt Virginia & her daughter came to get me to take me for portraits, and the way my stepmother was furious that they had shown up at our house.  After that day, there were no more visits from family, and no visits to family, either.  They were cut off.  My aunt and cousin, who I had lived with and who I loved so dearly, were told to stay away, and I missed them. They were my family, not this woman I barely knew and who didn’t seem to like me at all.
Lord, help me forgive this first hurt.  I don’t understand why she took my family away from me.  She ruined my close relationship with my cousin forever; it has never been the same to this day.  She broke my life beyond repair and set the stage for the abuse that was to come by ensuring that I had no one to tell, no one to care what happened to me.  She never loved me and she stole my daddy from me.  I don’t know how to stop blaming her for that.