Keep on Keeping Onনমুনা

Keep On Forgiving

One of my favorite stories is that of a man who was a deer hunter, an inveterate deer hunter.

He never missed an opening day, and every year, he begged his wife to go with him. Hunting, he said, was something they could do together. He offered to get her a rifle and teach her everything, but every year, she declined, shocked that he would even suggest such a thing.

Finally, she decided he was right. Furthermore, she decided to surprise him. She secretly bought a beautiful Savage Arms 110 bolt-action rifle and enough ammunition for a small militia. At the salesman’s recommendation, she also took shooting lessons, at which she discovered, to her shock, that she was a natural shot. She and her instructor were amazed at her incredible accuracy. She proudly took the rifle home to surprise her hunter husband.

He was surprised, to say the least, and genuinely overjoyed. He had dreamed of this. Likewise, he was delighted with her choice of rifles, but, of course, he wanted to know if she knew how to use the expensive weapon.

“Just let me demonstrate,” she responded triumphantly, at which they went into a field near their home. When she began to shoot the walnuts off the trees, all doubt was removed from the husband’s mind. This was great. This was an answer to his prayers. At last, he had a wife who wanted to go hunting with him and who could shoot like Annie Oakley.

On the opening day of deer season, he took her to a likely stretch of woods where he had hunted in the past. Leaving her in a deer stand, he explained that he would circle around the hills ahead and see if one would run toward her.

“If I hear you shoot,” he assured her, “I will come back immediately.”

He had hardly gotten out of sight, however, when he heard the report of her rifle. Jogging back to the stand where he’d left her, he found her holding the rifle on a terrified man, hands raised, backed up to a pine tree, and shivering in his boots.

“What in the world is going on here?” demanded the shocked husband.

“I have killed this deer,” she explained, “and this man is trying to drag him off.”

“No, lady,” said the frightened man. “You can have the deer. Just let me get my saddle off of him.”

The kind of legalistic reductionism which hopes to make life work by memorizing laws can backfire.

One can learn all the “rules” for successful living and wind up skillfully killing the wrong animal. “Just tell me the rules” may work in physics, but it does not work in relationships. People are not machines.

Treat your spouse like a ballistic galvanometer, whatever that is, and find out. Of all relationships, marriage is the least mechanical. Of all seasons in marriage, the senior years are the most emotionally complex and sensitive. Some of the glue that held it together in the early years may have lost its adhesiveness.

Just as our bodies tend to get more brittle and less resilient, our emotions can lose their elasticity.

Anger can be closer to the surface. Old, unresolved hurts now leave sensitive places with raw nerve endings that others can touch unintentionally. Those painful jolts of electricity may have always been there, but as we age, they become harder to hide. Harder, or perhaps we just do not try as hard to hide them. Perhaps, we figure, that hurt. It hurt a lot, and I’m old, and I deserve to show it hurt. In fact, I deserve to hurt somebody back.

I need to live in the flow of forgiveness, or like the lady deer hunter, I may confuse the bank officer with the crazy computerized world that seems determined to expose my every insecurity. What helps?

The only thing that helps is to keep on bathing in an unceasing stream of forgiveness.

If I can live and walk in forgiveness, if forgiveness flows up inside me like a spring, it will flow out of me and over those frightening people and things around me.

Forgiveness, like love, is not all about feeling. It is a life decision.

I can decide to be a forgiving person, and because that decision is mine, it means I am in control. I am not the defeated, frightened elderly victim of this crazy new world and the teenagers who run it. I decided. I am in control because nothing and no one can make me not forgive it, him, her, the bank, the waitress, whatever.