Articles
Forgiving Ourselves
Laura Bush, in her autobiography "Spoken from the Heart," tells of her involvement in a fatal car accident when she was 17. She was driving and chatting with a girlfriend in the car. Her inattention and inexperience combined in one horrible moment as she ran a stop sign, killing her friend and classmate who happened to be driving through the intersection -- proverbially in the wrong place at the wrong time.
This devastated the young Laura Welch, who was an otherwise model young lady. In her own words:
In the aftermath, all I felt was guilty, very guilty. In fact, I still do. It is a guilt I will carry for the rest of my life. ...
At some point most people in these situations come to make a mental peace with the fact that it was an accident. And that it cannot be changed. There is no great clock to unwind, no choice that can somehow miraculously be made again. But I can never absolve myself of the guilt. And the guilt isn’t simply from Mike dying. The guilt is from all the implications, from the way those few seconds spun out and enfolded so many other lives. The reverberations seem to go on forever (p. 64).
In a tragedy such as this, or perhaps in the less drastic but still damaging mistakes we all have made, how do we deal with the negative (or possibly deadly) effects we have had upon others? A few brief thoughts:
- None of us is above making mistakes. Many of us have done equally foolish things that could have killed someone -- but we just “lucked out.” There is an element of risk in so many things we do on a daily basis. Let us take care and act wisely but accept that, as human beings, we will sometimes err in judgment.
- God forgives and still has purpose for us. In the case of Laura Welch Bush, our former first lady, so much unrealized good was yet to come in the life of this broken-hearted teenager. But beyond this, our service to God on a spiritual level can still be meaningful -- if we do not let our self-imposed guilt and pity dominate and ruin our potential.
- Self-forgiveness is advice easier dispensed to others than applied to ourselves. Our emotions prevent exceptions for ourselves that we allow for others. To be harder on ourselves than God is playing into the devil’s hands twice.
