Too Good to Pass Up!

One more nearly forgotten article, but one too rich in possibilities and disappointments to pass up!

Imagine being attacked by a random person, dragged from your house, stabbed multiple times and left for dead. Imagine being able to drag yourself back inside and call for help, only to have the assailant return and try to batter his way into your home again.

What would your attitude towards your attacker be?

If you’re Christian, you should know what your response should be, right?

Forgiveness?

Not the sloppy, cultural forgiveness of pretending a wrong didn’t really happen, but the forgiveness that acknowledges a wrong was done and chooses to forgive because we are daily (hourly) forgiven in Christ. Could you imagine yourself doing that? What about forgiving someone who sought to hurt someone you love?

That’s what makes this article so tantalizing and yet frustrating. Go ahead and read it. It isn’t long. How does it resonate with you?

As the judge says at the end of the article in praising the victim, “If it (is the motive for not requesting an apology)is the consequence of faith I envy it.”

The article doesn’t use the word forgiveness, but it’s a good example of what it might look like. It never clarifies a motivation for such an incredibly loving response to an apparently random and inconceivable act of violence. The victim hints that the comfort and status of his own life compared to the assailants leads him to the conclusion he has no reason to bear a grudge of any kind. Would he respond differently if he had been assaulted by someone more successful, more comfortable?

The victim’s statement at the end of the article is further maddening. I think in these situations there’s no right, so go with it. What does that even mean? He likes the idea of providing people with tools to think about hard situations differently, but doesn’t provide any tools at all, just an outcome. I’d love to know more about his rationale, what led him to seek for and be concerned about the welfare of his assailant as much as his own.

It’s a worthy example of what forgiveness might look like, minus any reason for choosing this path over a more bitter response. I presume he would consider a more bitter response less ideal than his own, but then claims there’s really no basis at all for how to respond. Such logic essentially removes the criminality of the assailant, if there is no objective guidance about moral truth to help determine not only what actions are right and wrong, but what proper responses are when such boundaries are violated.