M E R I D I A N M A G A Z I N E
Let
It Go!
By
Jim Birrell
I have heard it said that forgiveness is the willingness to give up hope for a better past. How true!
This truth saved Karen, not her real name. I first met Karen while knocking on doors as a missionary in San Diego. While going from house to house searching for people to teach, I noticed—as so often happens in California, a garage apartment behind this particular home. The apartment was quite well hidden from view; we should not have seen it.
In fact, I was not even sure it was an apartment. With some uncertainty we knocked on the door. A woman on the other side of the door yelled, “Come in.” Such invitations always made me nervous as a missionary, so we knocked again. And again she yelled, “Come in,” so we reluctantly opened the door.
I shall never forget my first glimpse of Karen. There on the couch, across the dark room was a woman who looked to be about 50 years old. She was about 5’9” and bone thin. Her skin looked like leather. Her bleached-looking hair was in a disheveled heap upon her head. She wore no make up, and her clothes were plain. She was watching television; it was mid-morning.
What I especially remember vividly about Karen were her face and hands, specifically her fingers. Her fingers were long and thin, and distorted. They were twisted; she said she could not straighten them. In the curve of the knuckle, where her index and middle fingers bent to form the shape of a letter “C”, was a lit cigarette. Her distorted hand made it awkward for her to put the cigarette into her mouth.
Her face was shallow, with sunken eyes. And her expression was one of anger and defiance, inviting mostly pity. She was, simply put, one of the most miserable and pathetic creatures I had ever encountered. She was literally shriveling up from so many years of pulling inward. And if she ever ate, she appeared to mostly feed on anger. Karen was angry and bitter. She was the picture of human misery.
Before I could introduce us, she caught me by surprise by asking, “Did Brother Lewis send you?” Brother Lewis (not his real name) was Karen’s home teacher. “No, “ I said, “Jesus Christ.”
Karen invited us to sit down. She was as defensive as she was offensive. Her language was coarse and her tone accusing. And she was not the least bit uncomfortable letting us know how much she hated the church and the hypocrites that attend it.
In between sentences, her twisted and useless fingers would grasp the cigarette tightly between two knuckles and raise it to her mouth in awkward gestures; watching her smoke was a sight to behold.
During the next hour she shared with us her former life as the wife of a once prominent Stake President. She told stories of entertaining and hosting LDS General Authorities in her home; Church leaders had come to preside at Stake Conferences in her town and had stayed in Karen’s guest bedroom. She was mainstream Mormon through and through.
While Karen spoke of being the “ideal” Mormon woman, she confessed to fronting as a happy and dutiful wife of an LDS leader; she hid growing problems in the marriage. After all, how could the Stake President and his wife admit to having marital problems?
The more she spoke, the angrier she became. Others saw Karen as a woman who appeared to have it all—a husband who was successful at work, a leader in the Church, and respected in his community. And he was, for the most part, a decent father—when he was around.
Karen lamented that her husband was hardly around; his business and ecclesiastical duties kept him from being at home and being with her; Karen was especially bitter at and about this point. And there was more; houses so often have secrets.
Her voice shook with rage as she told about his “special friend” that he eventually left Karen for. “They should have ex-communicated him,” she raged. He had not committed sexual sins worthy of excommunication; however, in her mind, he had destroyed her family when he asked for a divorce to pursue this other relationship and that was reason enough for her to demand Church punishment. None came.
Seeing the Church as a men’s club, where men protect and privilege one another, she took off her temple clothing and lived a life in opposition to true principles—all the while blaming her unhappiness in the present on her circumstances of the past. And the angrier she became, the more her body literally curled up into a round, tight ball of misery.
She was speaking of events now that had occurred well over a decade earlier; she was simultaneously stuck in both the present and past. Sadly, Karen did not realize that the more you dwell on something, the bigger it becomes—the angrier or more fearful and hateful you become.
Anger is an Anchor
Most anger is a waste of time. Becoming angry is like dropping an anchor that you are tethered to. You go round and round, but you don’t get anywhere without dragging the heavy burden with you. And you get tired, real tired. You’ve got to learn to let anger go.
Karen had good reasons to be angry with her husband; however, she had better reasons to move beyond the anger—to let it go. Instead she blamed her emotions and responses on others, dismissing her own poor conduct while condemning such conduct in others. And she had plenty of anger at God, as well. As a result, Karen developed a physical condition that was destroying her body and causing her fingers to distort and curl. She was a mess, having been angry so long that it had become her personal identity and constant companion.
You might wonder why Karen held as tightly to her anger as she did her cigarette, given the clear physical, emotional and spiritual consequences of her bitterness? Anger has secondary gains that forgiveness would deny. Dr. Albert Ellis (1997) speaks of some of these gains in his book Anger: How to Live With and Without It.
Anger, among other things, gives us a sense of power by excusing our wrongful behavior. We do not have to feel responsible when we can attribute our bad conduct to someone whose actions are deemed even more deplorable. In fact, while we are acting in ways we know are wrong, we can feel quite morally justified because of what someone else did to us. Thus, we do not examine our own conduct; we accuse and excuse.
Out of this blaming comes a sense of moral superiority—it’s not me. I’m not the one responsible for this. I don’t have to change. I absolve myself of rational thought and behavior; the consequences of my choices are the responsibility of the one who has injured or offended me. This is victimology. It is an irrational response to the behavior of other people who act in disagreeable ways.
Ellis argues that most anger is irrational; it stems from the fact that we cannot get people to do what we want them to because they are busy doing what they want to do. Imagine that! Then we make irrational and self-sabotaging decision about the “goodness” of the person we are angry at; “A good person would never do that,” or “If you really loved me,” or “After all I do for you, how can you…(these are forms of manipulation).
In the irrational mind, you do not separate the evaluation of the situation from your evaluation of the person; it is the person not the situation that is bad. Thus, you do not let people off the hook, believing that most of us are doing the best we can, given our level of light and understanding—and circumstances.
People can irritate and anger us. According to Ellis, feel the anger and then let it go. Holding on to anger is always an irrational behavior. Nothing good will come of it.
That is how Karen lived her life—if you call her miserable existence a life. She had drunk from the bitter cup of life and become bitter; in fact, she had become a font of bitterness.
My missionary companion and I visited Karen almost daily after that. As a new missionary, my companion was eager to throw scripture at her and remind her of right and wrong. In his zeal to exhort, he forgot to first love. Most people really don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, as the saying goes.
My “greenie” (new missionary companion) would preach, and when she had had enough of it, and after she would tell him to stop, I would gently remind her of the power of the atonement to heal her unfortunate wounds. And I would remind her that in Christ there is hope. There is always hope, for when he forgives—which he willingly does—he also forgets. Can there by any greater message to the heart of the sinner than that? Without that hope, why repent?
We became quite close to Karen over the coming weeks, often enjoying meals at her home and sometimes catching her downtown smoking a cigarette and trying to hide it from us; she had promised to stop. I once asked if she was smoking or was she just on fire—she was trying to hide a lit cigarette behind her back, but the smoke gave her away. We laughed; expressions of love exceeded looks of disappointment at key moments. This is essential for hope when struggling with change.
I received a call one Sunday telling me that I would be transferred the following day. I called Karen and said, “If you are ever going to go to church with me, it had better be today.” She agreed to go, and the Ward Mission Leader and his wife drove Karen to Sacrament Meeting.
She sat next to me, trembling the entire time. About halfway through the service, a Fast and Testimony Meeting, she grabbed my hand and said, “I need your strength—walk with me to the pulpit.” I did, and let go as she took her turn at the microphone. Few people knew who Karen was that day; no one would soon forget her after her testimony.
She stood up and wept, telling the congregation how long she had been apart from the faith, how bitter she had been towards God, and how miserable a life she had lived in her anger and blaming. She begged the members to forgive and receive her. And she thanked God for opening up her voice to sing again; she was known for her beautiful voice, but had lost the ability to sing in her anger and isolation. But that morning, Karen sang the Sacrament song with the voice of an angel.
I lost track of Karen. Some 13 or so months passed before I saw her again. Days before I was to be released, Elder Paul H. Dunn spoke at a missionary fireside in North County, San Diego. As I entered the door, a woman I did not recognize came running up to me and threw her arms around me.
She was a beautiful woman, and vaguely familiar. Everything about her was glowing—her hair, skin, eyes, smile, and spirit. She was healthy and happy. “Do you remember me,” Karen asked? I was speechless, except to say, “Of course. How could I ever forget you?” She had put on healthy weight, and color had returned to her skin and hair. She looked marvelous, miraculous—transformed.
Then she took both of my hands. I stared at her beautiful hands and straight fingers; she actually had straight fingers! Karen told me that she had been in Hawaii for the past year and was continuing her involvement with the Church. In fact, she had returned to the temple.
There is no way that my feeble description can adequately convey Karen’s transformation. We stood there looking at one another for the longest time; little needed to be said. The returning prodigal was home—really home now. She had cast her burden on the Lord; she had given away her anger to God—she cast her cares like a quarterback casts a football, willing to give up control, and not like a fly fisherman who can maintain control and reel it back in at will. She now let God deal with the implications and complications of her former marriage and dispense eternal justice. All she wanted now was to be right with God and at peace with herself.
She had no time to lament her past life; she was too busy celebrating the transforming power of Christ in healing her. Her focus was fully on him. She knew he had forgiven her. She knew he would never mention those things she will never forget. How loving is Jesus, that the very things we do that hurt him the most will never be brought up if we but come unto him and give our sins away to know him.
Karen had the confidence that she was back in his loving arms and constantly in his sometimes intentionally forgetful mind. Her confidence was evident in this statement. As we stood together for the last time she said, “I don’t know if you have had any baptisms on your mission, Elder, but you got this one---you got this one,” pointing to herself. And she wept as she spoke those precious words.
I was privileged to be involved with many a conversion on my mission, but none more precious or pronounced. I saw first hand in Karen’s life what can happen when someone learns to “let it go.” Move on in Christ. Let it go. Give it to God and move on. It is a lesson that has saved me over and over again.
The God of all love who can straighten out a twisted hand can also heal a warped and wounded soul. Let it go, dear reader. Whatever is holding you hostage—whatever is twisting your soul, let it go. Give it over to God.
© 2004 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.