Life's Defining Choices

Let me share a very inspirational story with you from Approval Addiction by Joyce Meyer. It is set in a courtroom trial in South Africa. Let me forewarn you, this story made me cry & truly touched my heart. Once you have read the story, ask yourself if you would have shown Mr. Van der Broek such grace.

"A frail black woman about 70 years old slowly rises to her feet. Across the room and facing her are several white police officers. One of them is Mr. Van der Broek, who has just been tried and found implicated in the murders of both the woman's son and her husband some years before. Van der Broek had come to the woman's home, taken her son, shot him at point blank range and then set the young man's body on fire while he and his officers partied nearby.

Several years later, Van der Broek and his men had returned for her husband as well. For months she knew nothing of his whereabouts. Then almost two years after her husband's disappearance, Van der Broek came back to fetch the woman herself. How well she remembers in vivid detail that evening, going to a place beside a river where she was shown her husband, bound and beaten, but still strong in spirit, lying on a pile of wood. The last words she heard from h is lips as the officers poured gasoline over his body and set him aflame were, "Father, forgive them..."

Now the woman stands in the courtroom and listens to the confessions offered by Mr. Van der Broek. A member of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission turns to her and asks, "So what do you want? How should justice be done to this man who has so brutally destroyed your family?"

"I want 3 things, " begins the old woman calmly, but confidently. "I want first to be taken to the place where my husband's body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial."

She paused, then continued. "My husband and son were my only family. I want secondly, therefore, for Mr. Van der Broek to become my son. I would like for him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining in me." She also stated that she wanted a third thing. "This is also the wish of my husband. And so, I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr. Van der Broek in my arms and embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven." As the court assistants came to lead the elderly woman across the room, Mr. Van der Broek, overwhelmed by what he had just heard, fainted. As he did, those in the courtroom, family, friends, neighbors - all victims of decades of oppression and injustice - began to sing, softly but assuredly, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me."

Even when we are hurting we are still responsible for making the right choices, which is difficult & painful. We often have to do the right thing for a long time before we begin getting the right results.We must do right and keep doing right, pressing past how we feel about it.

Example: Treating someone right who has hurt us in the past is emotionally & mentally painful and can seem downright unfair. Why should we be good to someone who has hurt us? Well, if we can't find any other reason, we can choose to do it just because Jesus told us to (See Matthew 5:38-44). Forgive & treat them as if nothing happened.