Clinging to the Hurts of the Past

And the king of the Ammonites answered the messengers of Jephthah, “Because Israel on coming up from Egypt took away my land, from the Arnon to the Jabbok and to the Jordan; now therefore restore it peaceably.” Judges 11:13

Years ago, I was named in a lawsuit in which the allegations against me were truly awful. The lawsuit was eventually dropped but the initial accusations were terrible. According to the complaint, I was incompetent, rude, calloused, disinterested, dismissive, and indifferent. I didn’t believe I was any of those things, but the plaintiff’s attorney made me out to be a monster. I was hurt and I was angry. My resentment and fury built over several months until one night I realized I was lying awake, fantasizing about the truly horrible things I wanted to do to this attorney. The thing is, this attorney didn’t know or care. My hatred was poisoning my mind, while he slept like a baby. I’m not sure I got to the point of forgiveness back then, but, for my own sake, I had to figure out how to let go of my hatred or it was going to eat me alive.

Wallowing in the hurts of the past is toxic. That’s the lesson of today’s passage. In the story, the Ammonites attacked Israel, who turned to Jephthah for its defense. Jephthah sent messengers to the king of Ammonites, asking why he was attacking Israel. The enemy king responded that he was fighting to take back land that Israel had conquered 300 years earlier. Jephthah disputed this claim, but it changed nothing. The Ammonites, living in the hurts suffered centuries earlier, attacked and were soundly defeated. Clinging to past offenses, they destroyed themselves. Though the perceived injustice happened generations prior, this generation just couldn’t let it go, and embraced self-destruction.

In my own lawsuit situation, I’m sure that attorney believed he’d done nothing wrong and was never going to repent. So, in my mind, letting it go was tantamount to letting him off the hook for the hurt he’d caused me. The thought of just letting it go was offensive to me. I simply had no recourse though. I couldn’t change what he’d done and he was never going to apologize. My resentment was a poison that I was drinking, hoping it would hurt him, while he remained blissfully ignorant of my animosity.  So, my options were limited. I could cling to the hurt of the past, destroying myself, or, I could figure out how to surrender it. As hard as it was to give up my right to be offended, I was never going to get revenge, so I had to settle for the peace I found in letting the offense go.