I am participating in the Amazing Love Healing Ministry zoom class about inner healing. So when I came across this Facebook post of mine from 4 years ago, I was reminded of how needed this type of ministry is.
As trying as yesterday was with my mother's semi-tantrums and altered mental state, we managed to have a touching moment. And I cherish those times so much!
At the root of her emotional anguish is a deep-down feeling of rejection from her childhood. Yesterday she re-told a story that was imprinted on her life when she was only about 6 years old. On top of being poor, her family was stigmatized by the out-wedlock-pregnancy of her eldest sister, which became even her burden to bear at age 6.
She had been invited to a birthday party by a little girl in her first grade class. Her mother pinched pennies to buy a present for her to take. But when she got to the door, the little girl's mother took the present and told her she was not allowed to come in. She shut the door in her face. My mother walked around the neighborhood for hours, probably crying her heart out, and never told her mother how the woman had treated her. For all her mother knew, her little girl had enjoyed herself at the party.
And now, at age 93, when my mom is asked if she can forgive the woman, she says no. She says she has asked God to help her forgive, but He has never helped her.
The birthday girl was later crippled by polio. I'm sure her mother was put through a hell on earth. And yet my mother doesn't feel enough compassion for her to forgive her. I wonder sometimes what the true effect of unforgiveness is. Could this be what has caused her lifelong depression? Could it be the reason that despite a comfortable life, she lacks joy and has suffered with nagging illnesses that simply add to her despair but won't "just take her," as she often begs God to do?
It was a touching moment because, as I sat at her feet and encouraged her to talk about that event, it actually calmed her to be able to place her present anguish on a person from her past and allow it to be carried away for a time. She couldn't express her current mental pain, but she could clearly articulate the pain from her past.
Even though the forgiveness didn't come, I feel in my heart that it's there, maybe not in that trapped moment in time, and maybe not now in the reliving of it, but in a separate space that only God knows...because He has felt the rejection from all of mankind that she felt and still carries with her, and He forgives even when we don't know what we do.
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