I was talking to another man in the program today, who has had difficulty with forgiveness with one of his parents over the years. He’s been sober for a long time and this has come up any number of times. The deep resentment.
Forgiveness is always a tricky subject. It’s so easy to say the words, but it’s deep down where there’s so much difficulty. I know how hard it was for me. When I got to the 8th and 9th steps I really ran into obstacles within. I would pray about this kind of thing, but always the thoughts would come back and I’d be right back into the anger again. It wasn’t until I took action that the whole thing turned around. It was miraculous.
Without going into detail, I can remember going into offices to make amends to people I couldn’t stand. I remember being so angry going in. When I came out, something had happened. No! t only had the anger dissapered, but it has vanished for a lot of others I held so much resentment against.
The reason I bring this up is the man I was talking to has difficulty communicating with his parent. I thought about what I could say to him. I told him about a man in the program that I’ve harbored feelings against for some time now. We talked about tolerance and understanding. I told him that as long as I just thought about my problem, nothing happened. Not long ago I decided to take action. The first thing was that I stopped talking about the man. He’s an easy target, since a lot of others have had much the same difficulty. The next thing was that I started to not only talk to the man, but to go out of my way to offer gestures of friendship toward him.
The result was that this has helped me in a number of areas in my life with other relationships.
One of the things we talked about was the phenomenon of a vacuum. Nature abhors vacuums. If you empty out part of yourself, say your resentments and anger by forgiveness, you create a vacuum. There’s nothing there in the space you’ve made within. If you don’t replace it with something positive by the lack of action, something negative will move in. The parable from the NT about the vacant house is all about this kind of phenomenon.
The story goes this way. A man had a piece of property. An empty house. One day he visited this place and found that the house was filled with clutter and rubbish. He decided he might want to sell the house, so he cleaned the whole house, throwing out all the trash. What he didn’t know was that he had also thrown out a demon, who had taken up residence there. It seems this devil wandered all over looking for shelter. One day the devil went back to! the same house he had been thrown out of and found it was empty. He immediately moved back in and brought in seven devils worse than himself to live there.
No matter what we might think of this story, it illustrates the point. We clean house and sometimes leave it empty. We don’t populate it with positive things. It’s a vacuum.
I’m sitting here filling up a vacuum. At least filling up empty space.
Ned
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