Corrie ten Boom told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn’t sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. “His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor,” Corrie wrote, “to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.” “And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force — which was my willingness in the matter — had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”
–Quoted in this morning’s sermon by yours truly on forgiveness
She tells another tale about after the war when she met a woman who had been a particularly cruel camp guard. The woman had become a Christian and Corrie had to actually, face-to-face, forgive the woman.
I heard her speak back in the 70s. Corrie ten Boom was one tough woman. The last I looked, the movie version of [i]The Hiding Place[/i] is still available and it is well-worth watching.
There is yet another tale, it may be the same one, but I think it was a male guard, who supervised the murder of Corrie’s sister. This is as best as I can remember it:
At a speaking engagement, she had looked up and seen him in the back of the church, head bowed. After she had finished he slowly came up to the front, and introduced himself. And reminded her of what he had done to her sister. Then said:
“Finally I have seen that what I have done in the war was not the result of ‘following orders’ but of sin in my own heart. I have prayed to the Lord for forgiveness, and accepted Him as my savior, but I need to ask your forgiveness, too.”
She says that as she looked at him and listened to his story, hatred such as she had not felt before welled up in her heart, and she savored it. But then she realized that if anything she had said that night meant ANYTHING at all, she had to take that difficult step and forgive him. So she said the words, but it didn’t have meaning until she stepped forward and embraced him, and the hatred flowed out, replaced by Divine Love*. Then she knew the true power of forgiveness.
It’s from one of her books, but I can’t remember which one.