Forgiveness

RA is a dynamo! She is full of vision, leadership and wisdom. This year has been a tough year for her, she’s had a number of health issues and has had a number of issues emerge for the students in her care in residence. One such incident with a residence student triggered a traumatic event from her past, and she was caught in a hard place between caring for this student and being filled with anger at the incident and what it brought up in her. When she told me this story, she said, “I’m trying really hard to love this student but I HATE him, I really really hate him for what he’s done.” Just after our last meeting as a leadership team, she felt prompted to go talk to this student. She planned to let him know how he’s been out of line and all the pain he’s caused other people. She knocks on his door, and is completely disarmed when he starts crying. He confides in her that his mother passed away in the last month and he hadn’t been dealing with it well, and all his problematic behaviour was his way of not dealing with his grief. Now as all this is transpiring, RA is talking to Jesus, she’s annoyed because she knows He wants her to minister to this student and care for him in his grief because she’s been through similar experiences of losing someone close to her AND also knows how to distract herself with self-destructive behaviours instead of dealing with her grief. She knows that God wanted her to forgive this student and love him, not scold him as she had planned to do. She felt her anger melt away as she heard more of his story, and she was able to offer him words of hope and encouragement coming from her own experiences. She told her boss after this encounter happened, and her boss waxed poetic about how great she was for using her experiences to help and heal others, and she quickly asserted, “No, this is God teaching me about forgiveness.”