BEARING WRONGS PATIENTLY

Patience is a virtue. It is one that most of us wish we had in abundance. It may also be the virtue we lack the most. Who of us, after being injured, doesn’t want to hurry the healing process so that we can get on with life? We know we have to be patient even as we can’t wait until the cast is off or the ribs are healed or the surgeon says that we can now play golf again.

The healing process takes time. We have to be patient with it simply because we have no choice. Well, we do have a choice. We all know people, maybe ourselves included, who tried to rush the healing process only to make matters worse. I had a parishioner once who had back surgery four straight Januarys because she refused to allow her body to fully heal. The surgeon told her that if she came back in the following January, he would fuse her spine. She behaved herself and patiently allowed her body to fully heal.

Dealing with bodily healing takes patience and sometimes, it seems, infinite patience depending on our personalities. But it does take patience. We have all learned that the hard way. Hopefully we won’t have to learn it again, but we probably will because, it seems, every time we have to deal with sickness and suffering, we do all we can to rush the healing. Patience, patience, patience.

The same is true and perhaps is even more difficult, when it comes to dealing with those occasions when someone has wronged us: said something that was untruthful, caused us to lose a job or our reputation, deliberately hurt us. It often takes longer to heal in those situations than it does to heal from physical ills. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. There are countless people throughout history whose reputations have only been restored after their deaths when the truth finally came out. In retrospect all we can do is admire their patience in dealing with the injustice of it all.

And that is the issue at hand. How do we deal with the injustice of what another has done to us? It has hurt us deeply, scared us to the quick and the pain and the hurt does not seem to go away even after all these years? How do we do it? From where can we find the patience to make our lives, in some cases, livable? How do we move on and act as if nothing has happened when it indeed has and we get angrier by the day?

There is no easy answer if there is any answer. What we do know is that we have to move on or else we will be stuck in the past and our present and future will suffer as a result. What we have to do is patiently bear the wrong done to us because it cannot be undone. In truth, we may never be able to find it in our hearts to forgive those who have wronged us. They have to live with what they have done and so do we.

For us to live after the wrong done to us, we have to patiently and prayerfully go from one day to the next until we can fully leave the past behind.