Love is NOT Resentful

Love is not Resentful 愛裏不計算人的惡

Chinese version

RESENTMENT IS YESTERDAY'S irritation scratched into the sensitive membranes of our memory. Any evil once done is an everlasting fact. We remember the hurts so that we ca! n enjoy the pain of yesterday over and over again. We keep it alive for the pleasure we can get from our resentment against the one who hurts us. We also enjoy feeling noble and worthy as the decent person who was wrongly hurt.

Resentment brings us deadly pleasures.

Resentment forces a neighbor to be and remain an enemy. As we insist on keeping score of hurts, resent­ment feeds our anxiety that we are behind in this game of ill-will and must catch up. Each one must pay for the pain he caused before he can face us as a moral equal. We insulate ourselves from feeling any obligation to re­member his needs. We frame that single wrong vividly, intensely, painfully in our memory. This is how resentment justifies our refusal to love by falsifying reality.

We want the offending person to remember the wrong as clearly as we do, so that when we finally even the score, he will be hurt enough to satisfy us. Resent­ment is really a painful desire that the other person feel a pain he knows he deserves.

Suppose that it was you who once caused hurt to someone, and that the person you hurt has kept the memory of that alive for years. He has woven a tangled web of resentment against you. You have felt it, obliquely and subtly but acutely. You felt his anger without explanation, rejection without confron­tation. His resentment has hurt you just as it has been hurting him. He lets your hurtful act fester in his mind; you let his refusal to forgive fester in your mind. Resentment in both parties make reconciliation difficult.

Love exorcises resentment.

Needless to say, agapic love does not shield us from hurt. Love is not a desensitizer. The loving person hurts, and he knows who and what caused the hurt. Love has the power to look cruel facts in the face, see them for what they are, even when aimed at us . Love does not blind us to reality or gloss over pain. But love's concern for the hurts of the one who causes hurt empowers us to forgive before we dig a channel for resentment in our memory.

Love alone has the power to release memory's grip on yesterday's evil, for only love is the power that moves us toward people without expectation of return and therefore with a great tolerance for hurt. The person with the power to forget is the person who can bring others around to doing the same. Able to start fresh for himself, leaving past history's confu­sion tangled, he can carry on Christ's own ministry of reconciliation.

Love is the power that drives us toward the other who has done us wrong because it is able to tear up every moral score­ card. This is reconciliation, and reconciliation is love's ultimate goal.

Love does not demand explanations and apologies or keep accounts.

Love does not take pleasure in remembering how much we have coming from people who hurt us.

For love is the power whose only direction is the help, healing, and salvation of the other person.

This is why love has the power to overcome resentment.

撮要自 已故牧師Rev. LB. Smedes之「愛在限制中: 在自私的世界中實踐無私的愛Love within limits: realizing selfless love in a selfish world. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1979. 」 Rev. Smedes was a retired minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a former ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_B._Smedes