4-5 Together they attacked an army of ten thousand Canaanites and Perizzites at Bezek, and the Lord helped Judah defeat them. During the battle, Judah’s army found out where the king of Bezek[a] was, and they attacked there. 6 Bezek tried to escape, but soldiers from Judah caught him. They cut off his thumbs and big toes, 7 and he said, “I’ve cut off the thumbs and big toes of seventy kings and made those kings crawl around under my table for scraps of food. Now God is paying me back.” Judges 1:4-7
“Love your enemies. Do good to them.”-Jesus
This month has been one of me stepping into my role as a spiritual leader. There have been numerous people who have told me that I am a warrior for God, fighting for what is right with compassion. While I am only now coming to believe in this, for the longest time I’ve always felt as if everyone could see this but me. I thought that perhaps people were saying things that would never come to fruition. My faith lacked when it came to believing good news for myself.
My team leader has been so wonderful in going through my spiritual baggage. I found that I have stuffed my emotional junk for the sake of peace in my life. However, if you live in community long enough, you can only fake who you are for so long before all the things you stuff come spilling out on your teammates. As I have been journaling my brains out, I have found that much of my identity has come from being able to joke about injustice done to me in my life. Not to have a pity party, but looking back, I remember being “that guy” that everyone made fun of. I remember being shunned from people that befriended me at church youth group because I wasn’t in their peer group. I remember being belittled and used by women in college and carrying a chip on my shoulder towards women in general since graduating.
I felt like my thumb had been taken. The warrior spiritual leader in me had been taken. So, I had resorted to self-deprecating humor, misdirected anger, and a silent smugness for people who suffered similarly to me. I had gone into survival mode, and since have not been able to fight the fight that God had put before me.
However, this past Sunday, our contact preached a powerful sermon about the two passages above. He said that people are living as if their thumbs had been cut off. They had been defeated instead of living as the people God had made them to be, settling for being anything less than God’s favored children. He then said that whatever they did to you, God would repay them.
Now here’s the part that took me off guard. The pastor said, if you truly want to be healed, you are to go back to your enemy, and love them. My teammate told me loving them does not mean ignoring their wrong. Rather, by taking your thumb in your hands, going over to the ones who have removed them, placing it in their face and saying, “You took this from me, and God has restored me back in love because the God in me is greater than what you tried to do to me. And because He died for you too, I forgive you.”
I don’t wish to “always play the victim”, however, I also do not want to downplay the things I have struggled with to come to this point.
So in the name of freedom: for those who have tortured me with your words, I honestly pray that you find healing from what caused you to inflict those deep wounds. For all the women who have deemed me unworthy: That was not fair and it cut me deep. However, I have not been kind to women because of those deep wounds. I ask to those women who I have hurt to forgive me.
In the name of Jesus, I forgive all of you. I forgive you because I know deep down we are all children of God, in need of a Savior. I forgive you because I no longer want to be the judge, because I am crappy one in comparison to God. And I forgive you because I want us both to be free. You are worthy of love,
In Jesus name.
