Forgiveness

Just finished watching an episode of C.S.I. where a boy killed his own brother over something incredibly trivial. The parents who loved both sons dearly now have to face the fact that one has killed the other, and now they have to face their son.

I dunno why, but the episode really struck a chord in me. Maybe its cos only today in church we kept talking about the forgiveness of God, and how our sins run so deep that it took the blood of God himself to redeem and purify us. It took the blood to perform the act, but it took the love of God to induce the act. If ever you asked me who or what God was, above anything else I'd say He was a God of such apparent contradictions. The same God who couldn't bear to see us die sent His own Son to do just that. The same God who was so gentle to the widows and children who had the harshest pronouncements on the leaders of the land. The God who taught that the first shall be the last and the last shall be the first. The God who taught me to seek him by hiding His face. The God who said that those who keep their lives will lose it but those who lose it will gain it back.

And with His greatest attribute of all - love, I guess its no wonder that it is steeped in contradictions. Its love that spurs us towards the greatest deeds we ever aspired to, but the same love that sometimes cause us to show our ugliest sides to the very ones whom we claim to love. Many times it is love that drives us to give of eerything we have to seek the happiness of the one we love, yet that same love when rejected can embitter us to be willing to hurt ourselves if only to hurt the other person.

I was left wondering after the show ended, when the kid was led away into custody, how the producers would have continued the show after that. What sort of reaction would the parents have. How do you love someone who has killed your own son? How do you love someone who could not have hurt you more? Someone will enevitably shout out the obvious answer that it is exactly the love of God which did that. But I am no God. And sometimes it seems so terribly unfair that God should demand of me what He Himself did.

But on the flipside it again inspires me to stand in awe of the love of a God, willing to watch us kill His very own Son, just so that we could come back into His presence to hear Him tell us that He loves us. If love truly inspires us to the noblest endeavours, why is it that the loftiest love seems to only drive us to the greatest mockery we are ever capable of? Why is it so easy for me to spurn His sacrifice in a moment of pique?

Easter Sunday is coming in a few week's time. And even as I need to help prepare a special program for the occasion, I find myself more and more unsettled. Its seems that with every year that passes, with each increasingly tragedy that I hear about, whether its on a macro scale (SARS, Tsumani, war...) or a micro scale (so and so' parents are getting a divorce, broke up, or relative passed away so young...), a little more of the lightness goes out of me, and along with that a little more light. Life only progressively becomes heavier and darker.

And its funny how I can lie in bed and suddenly just have a good cry like the wuss that I am, yet am unable to cry at a funeral or when it seems more appropriate. Crying always helps. A little lightness returns, which I swear is not from the loss of water from my system. But everytime I think back to Gethsemane and the Cross, I find that I no longer have that same tenderness of heart that I always swore I'd guard so jealously.

A love that should inspire, yet that has becomes a burden. Tenderness that seems to have irrevocably slipped away. Forgiveness that I seem to have forgotten and forgotten to cherish.

Love, tenderness, forgiveness.

These will be three things that I will be asking God to teach me about this season of Lent.