Reframe Your Offender… This is Day 35 of our 40 day journey learning how to recover and return from a personal setback.

On Day 34 I talked about the idea of reframing your circumstances. It's also important to reframe anyone who has caused you your exile, that is, your offender.

Don’t Let Your Offender Control You

Reframing your offender involves forgiveness. We often frame our offender as the winner in a conflict. We frame them as the one in control while we are the one who is powerless. These pictures need to change.

We often think that anger and resentment toward our offender is a means to balance the power. They hurt us so we hold them in contempt. We refuse to forgive them unless they fulfill our demands.

But what we fail to see is that our lack of forgiveness gives our offender control over us. As long as we think that they owe us, we feel obligated to resent them. This only prolongs our time in exile.

Forgiveness Gives You Back Control

If we want to return from exile, we need to free ourselves from any anger and resentment toward our offender. This freedom comes by forgiving.

Forgiveness doesn't excuse the offense. It simply frees you from the need to provide payback of any kind. It enables you to close the book on the past chapters of your life and give your full attention to the present moment and the future.

Isn't it bad enough that your offender stole from you? Do you really want to give them any more space in your brain, even for a minute?

Forgiveness Absorbs Your Loss

I appreciate Miraslov Volf's view of forgiveness as absorbing wrong. He says:

Hanging on the cross, Jesus provided the ultimate example of his command to replace the principle of retaliation (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”) with the principle of nonresistance (“if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also”) (Matthew 5:38-42).  By suffering violence as an innocent victim, he took upon himself the aggression of the persecutors.  He broke the vicious cycle of violence by absorbing it, taking it upon himself.  He refused to be sucked into the automatism of revenge… Exclusion and Embrace, pages 291-292

Scarcity Keeps Your in Exile

People who refuse to forgive think in terms of scarcity. They see themselves as having a limited amount of something. Whenever someone offends them, they lose a little more of what little they have. Their only play in response to the loss is to ward off future attacks with anger and resentment. Their world gets increasingly smaller. Exile becomes their permanent home.

Abundance Frees You to Forgive

A faith-filled person doesn't think in terms of scarcity. They believe in a God who can fill up what is lost through any offense. Because of this, they absorb the losses of life and are free to leave their exiles.

Could unforgiveness be keeping you in exile?  Maybe you not only need to reframe your offender but reframe God as well. God needs to be framed as someone who can help you absorb your offenses and take back your life. I’ll look more at this in my next post.

I’ve written a number of blog posts on the topic of forgiveness. Search the word in the box below to see these posts.

These forty days of devotionals are adapted from my book, Return from Exile … available on Amazon.com.

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