GOD’S RELEASE

When Peter asked Jesus if he should forgive others as many as seven times, Jesus answered, "not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:22). Obviously Jesus was not saying mark off each forgiveness up to seventy-seven and then stop forgiving. He was wiping out all calculated response both to ourselves and to others. He threw a legalism of checks and balances out the window. He invited us to a wider place, a freer air, where compassion and mercy are no longer a matter of arithmetic.

But until we let God release us, we cannot release ourselves or others. We remain in that condition of self-judgment, a judgment of others, that spiritual prison, anxiously counting up those pennies!

God longs to enter these prisons of ours, throw open the doors, bring us into… "grace" -- the realm of free gifting -- not to earn love but because we are already loved.  

-- Flora Slosson Wuellner in Forgiveness, the Passionate Journey  (Nashville, Tenn.: Upper Room Books, 2001)


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