The Sacred “Pause Button”

Deuteronomy 30:19-20a, CEB -  I call heaven and earth as my witnesses against you right now: I have set life and death, blessing and curse before you. Now choose life—so that you and your descendants will live—by loving the Lord your God, by obeying his voice, and by clinging to him.

 

“Between Stimulus and Response There Is a Space. In That Space Is Our Power To Choose Our Response”                                  Stephen Covey, quoting an unknown author

 

                When I was a teenager, the primary way to listen to audio recordings (music, lectures, etc) was cassette tape.  I actually still have a cassette player and several cassettes.  Over the years, I had several players and one of the common problems I had with them is that eventually, the “pause” button would break.  Sometimes, I think we have the same challenge with our actions.  Our pause button is either broken or we are not even aware that we have the ability to pause before reacting to a situation. 

Stephen Covey, in his many writings, made the above quote popular, though he claimed that he did not author the wisdom.  In any case, it is a fact.  Whatever happens to us, we have a choice as to how we act in response.  I have caught myself using the phrase, “it was just an automatic reaction,” when trying to justify the way I acted.  The reality is that I made a choice to act though it was a unaware choice. 

The remedy for this is (re)discovering our “pause” button.  When we are “triggered,” by something someone does, we can push pause, by taking a long intention breath.  This gives us some space to consider how we will act (or not act as the case may be) as we respond to the stimulus.  This is where the scripture above comes into play.  We can choose blessings or curses.  We can choose in alignment with the values we have learned from our faith and wisdom traditions.  We can take a moment to remember our connection to God’s Spirit and allow ourselves to be guided by divine image placed in us by God. 

This has implications for the forgiveness process.  Hurts that we have experienced in the past tend to replay in our mind every time we remember the offense.  We relive the hurt as we “replay the tape” in our head once again.  The forgiveness process calls for pushing “pause” on these old recordings and thus, creating the space to make a more life-giving choice.  Acting in life-affirming ways towards those who have hurt us begins to erase those old tapes over time.  We most likely will always remember the offense, but the event will lose it’s power to trigger us.  We become more and more free.

 

Question:  Are there some old but familiar recordings that you need to “push pause” on in order to create space for a new response?

 

Prayer:  God, thank you for the gift of choice.  Keep this gift ever before us in the moments/spaces where we choose between blessings and curses.  Help us discern and act in alignment with the divine image You have placed within us.  Amen.

 

Prayer Focus:  Pray for school-age children and school personnel who are finishing up another school year in the shadow of yet another mass school shooting.

 

Song:  Choose Life – Big Tent Revival

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX4fC4WFCIU

Forgiveness is a Choice

 

Matthew 18:21-22, NIV - Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.

 

This week, we are talking about what forgiveness is and yesterday, we talked about the starting place of forgiveness is acknowledging that there was an offense.  Forgiveness is awareness.

                Next, forgiveness is a choice.  This might seem obvious to many, but I have been surprised to talk to so many people who are waiting on the moment when they feel forgiveness.  There are reasons for this, for most of us have had the experience of our feelings changing about something that happened in the past.  The intense feelings experienced when the event happen somehow fade over time.  We get new information about the event that changes our perspective.  For example, the experience of becoming a parent helped me see much of my childhood from a different perspective.  I feel differently about things that happened when I was a kid because I have now had kids of my own.  Being on the other side of that experience has caused my feelings to evolve.

                This also sometimes happens in relationship to situations that require forgiveness.  A new perspective and/or new information can help us feel more ready to forgive.  However, that change in feeling is not forgiveness.  Even with a more receptive heart, forgiveness is still a choice.  This will become more evident as we talk about other aspects of what forgiveness is, but right now, it’s important to note some other problems with seeing forgiveness as a feeling. 

                If we have to wait for a feeling to develop before we can forgive, than there is no hope for some offenses to ever be forgiven.  New information and new perspective might arise that actually intensify our feelings of anger and hurt instead of cause those feelings to subside, pushing us further away from feeling like forgiving.  We might not ever get new information or perspective.  In many, if not most cases, our feelings about the offense may never change, which leads us to our next problem with forgiveness as a feeling.

                Forgiveness is not passive.  In the passage above, Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive an offender.  The question itself assumes that forgiveness is a choice.  Peter wants to know how many times he must make that choice before it alright to make the different choice not to forgive a repeat offender.  Without getting into biblical numerology, let me just say that Jesus’s answer effectively means “as many times as there are offenses.”  Jesus says this because forgiveness is a choice to free oneself from the entanglement created by the sins committed against us.  It is to claim the victory that Jesus Himself has won over sin in our particular situation.  God doesn’t get entangled in our sin because God chooses to forgive it.  God never gets to the point where God says, “well, that’s it;  I’m done forgiving.”  God’s eternal “yes” to the question, “will I forgive this time?” is never negated by our propensity to keep sinning.  Jesus essentially says to Peter, “you don’t want to stay entangled with others’ sin anymore than God does.”  Forgiveness is not only always a choice; it is always the best choice. 

                Actively choosing to forgive begins to break the hold that the offenses others have committed against us have on our hearts.  It can and often does begin to change the seemingly intractable negative feelings we have about what has been done to us.  Instead of passively waiting for forgiveness to move into our emotion, we can choose to actively move toward our own healing and freedom from the past.  This choice opens up more possibilities than we had before. 

 

Question:  Are there offenses others have committed against you that you have been waiting to feel differently about?

 

Prayer:  Thank you, Gracious God, for always choosing to forgive us.  Making that choice ourselves sometimes seems impossible.  Help us see the way toward making the choice to forgive as well.  Amen.

 

Prayer Focus:  Pray for God to bless someone who you currently hold resentment toward.

 

Song:  Losing – Tenth Avenue North

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHcVTbyJqis