I went to church last Sunday with my owner; he was taking the service, and the congregation were kind enough to invite me along as well. And on the whole, I was very well behaved. I sat on the back of a pew and listened quietly to the whole sermon. I joined in the hymns with some whistles and squawks. And I didn’t surprise anybody by suddenly landing on their head.
Of course, I can’t go anywhere without making a bit of a mess. By the end of the service, there was a small mound of almond fragments on the floor by my pew, and I did have one unfortunate accident from my other end, which needed clearing up. But nobody seemed to mind; nobody got upset, -and I felt that both of my minor indiscretions had been totally excused; in fact, -forgiven.
In life, we’re sometimes confronted by much bigger and more difficult things to forgive, and then humans aren’t always so good at it, as this little story goes to show…….
Three Hell’s Angels pulled up at a roadside café where a truck driver, -who was just a little guy, -was perched on a stool, quietly eating his lunch. The three Hell’s Angels came in, grabbed the little guy’s food away from under his mouth and laughed in his face before throwing it on the floor. They were clearly expecting some kind of reaction, but the truck driver said nothing. He simply got up, paid his bill and went back out to his truck.
One of the Hell’s Angels looked at the waitress and said: “He wasn’t much of a man, was he?” The waitress replied: “Maybe not,” and then, looking out of the window, she added: “And he’s not much of a truck driver either. He’s just run over three motorbikes.”
My little story demonstrates how human division, rifts, feuds, conflicts and even wars, can all begin. And that old Hebrew saying of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” settles nothing; in fact, it merely adds fuel to the fire. No, forgiveness is one of the hardest things for humans and parrots to deal with, but it’s also one of the most important. And it’s what ultimately separates out God-filled Christians from just about everybody else. Because you can only truly forgive if you have the presence of God inside your heart.
“Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’.”
(Luke 23:34a)
“I bear no ill; I bear no grudge.”
(Gordon Wilson in 1989, just hours after his daughter Marie had been killed by the IRA’s Enniskillen Remembrance Day bomb).
“I forgive you, brother, with all my heart.”
(Corrie ten Boon, in 1947, on being confronted by a former Ravensbrook Nazi concentration camp guard who had since become a Christian).
Comments