Have
you ever been lied to or betrayed by someone you loved and trusted? Have you
ever been harmed physically or had a medical procedure that left you worse off
than before? Has anyone ever harmed one of your children? Has anyone not
believed you when you were telling the truth? Has anyone you loved walked away
from the relationship and refused to try to work out the differences? Everyone
has been hurt by someone else. How do we get rid of the hurt and move on with
our lives. How can we forgive?
Thirty
years ago we were close friends with a couple perhaps ten years younger than we
were. They also loved our two young daughters and were the first ones to
babysit when we went away for our first weekend workshop. As our first book,
The Shared Heart, became popular, the woman, whom I will
call Linda, started working for us as an assistant. Then Linda’s husband
suddenly left her and decided he wanted to live a monastic life at an ashram. Linda
could not afford the rent on her apartment and, because we were going away for
the summer, we offered to let her housesit.
We
returned six weeks later to discover that Linda had robbed us of everything
valuable. Because we were going camping and river rafting, I had left my
valuable engagement ring in a very safe and hidden place. It was gone along
with the only thing that I had from my grandmother, a beautiful (and valuable)
diamond pin. Both were irreplaceable.
Barry’s expensive camera was missing as well as countless other things. Linda
had searched through every box and drawer in our home, even dumping out our
Christmas decorations and breaking most of the antique ones from my great
grandparents. Then Barry called the bank and discovered that Linda had stolen
thousands of dollars from our banking account. She was gone with no way to
discover her new location. Her former husband had no idea where she had gone.
How does one deal with something like that? We loved Linda and trusted her
implicitly. It was the betrayal more than the stolen items that hurt the most.
Of
all of the things that were stolen, it was my engagement ring that hurt the
most. Barry had worked for a whole summer as a waiter to earn the money to buy
that ring. He gave it to me in a most romantic way when we were both twenty one
years old. I dearly loved it! Nothing could replace the deep sentiment I felt
for the ring given to me by Barry in the innocence of our youth.
Over
the years, whenever I would tell the story about why I do not have an
engagement ring, I would get tense and sometimes my body would start to shake.
Often I could not sleep at night after telling the story. I just could not get
it out of my head and heart that someone we trusted so much could betray us and
then disappear. I hate to admit this, but I used to fantasize being able to
tell Linda all of the ways that her actions had hurt me. After a while I just stopped thinking about it
and sometimes several years would go by until someone would draw my attention
back to the fact that I did not have an engagement ring.
Fifteen
years after the robbery I picked up the phone and it was Linda. She was crying
and told me how terrible she still felt about what she had done. She told me
about her many sleepless nights and how badly she felt about herself. She was
crying so deeply that my heart opened to her. I felt a strong presence of love
come through my voice as I told her that Barry and I still loved her very much
and that she must have been very desperate to do such a thing to us. I told her
that we forgave her. Since she was living in New England and we were traveling
there to do a workshop the next week, we arranged a time to meet. I told her it
would be so good to get together and share our feelings and that she could
begin to pay us back for the many thousands of dollars that were stolen. She
agreed to meet with us and to begin paying us back. I ended the call with a lot
of love and forgiveness.
She
never met us, never started paying us back, and never contacted us again. For
years I felt as if I had been too loving with her and criticized myself. Just
last year I was reading the prayer of St. Francis in which he says, “Grant that
I might seek to forgive rather than be forgiven.” In reading those words I felt
that Linda had given me the gift of being able to fully forgive someone in this
life for a deliberate transgression. Everything I had said to her on the phone
fifteen years ago was right. The power of love asks that we forgive completely.
I needed to let go of the story behind why I do not have an engagement ring. I
will always miss my ring for I dearly loved it. But I do not have to cling to
the story behind why it is gone. I can let go of the story and be free. I am
grateful that I was given the opportunity to truly forgive someone.
Last
month I was sitting in a nail salon having my toenails done. There were five
women my age having their fingernails done. Each of these women was wearing at
least two or three very expensive diamond rings on each hand. The person doing
my nails noticed me looking at their rings and gently said, “I like your
wedding band.” I looked down at my simple gold wedding band, which we purchased
for forty dollars forty-six years ago. I have worn it every single day. The
lack of the diamond ring that went with it no longer bothers me, for I have a
much greater diamond to wear in my heart … the gift of forgiveness for another.
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