"You do not understand healing, because of your own fear." (ACIM 2-IV.1.9)After feeling slighted, I went to the Good Book to see if Solomon had anything to say about these business endeavours that can often go sideways. But a thought came over me: where I believed I was looking for wisdom and comfort, I was really looking to feel vindicated in my aspirations to retaliate; to get even.
And suddenly I realized that isn't the solution. The solution, instead, is to recognize that to some degree, all people are spiritually sick, and need healing and reconciliation - not retribution. I had a moment of clarity where I understood that "correcting" the situation doesn't have to look like mending a broken infrastructure so that I can feel better about its aesthetics, it can mean demolishing it and building a new one, with better quality materials.
Would I not rather help than hurt? After all, when I seek to "correct" someone, it's really only myself I am wounding. One of my favourte adages is, "I drink the poison and expect them to die." This is what resentment and anger does to us - we hit ourselves with the club of righteousness we intended for others.
As with anything worthwhile, it takes practice, trial and error. But today I see that I am not the judge, jury, and executioner that I fancied myself to be. And thank God, because that is a miserable way to live. It is not my instinct to forgive when I am offended - it is to rebuke. But I have found by direct experience and from hearing the stories of others, that self-righteous anger is no good whatever. It often ends up with me, the offended, having to make the amend. And that is truly twisted.
"All healing is essentially the release from fear." (ACIM 2-IV.1.7). And all healing is an act of forgiveness. I do not play a working role in the courtroom that I superimpose myself into where the person who offends me is awaiting sentencing. Rather, Satan is the prosecutor, God is the judge, and I am the accused on trial. I am not the prosecutor of my peers, and when I forgive, I step out of a role that I forced myself into that causes me disturbance.
Loves wins when I obey God and stop contesting my peers. That doesn't mean that I need to go back to a corroding design, but it does mean that I heal through the will of forgiveness, which is complete freedom from the bondage that I only place myself in when I think I am right.
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