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When Mentoring Your Enemy

This whole month I’ve shared with you about the importance of forgiveness and how it helps you grow as a person and a believer.  In this last piece, I wanted to explore a hard topic that many may want to ask me.  How does one forgive another who seems to want to destroy you?  The stories come in different ways like someone that is jealous, or that the offender is determined on making the other unhappy.  The offender has been in different forms like bosses, exes, a bitter family member or a neighbor.  No matter what the story and who the offender is, the question came; “How do I forgive this person, who haunts me or who tests my very being?”

My husband and I have worked with teenagers since we were teenagers ourselves.  When he took the job as a youth pastor in his early 20’s, we met teens from all kinds of walks of life and experiences.  Many of their situations were not their fault.  The choices of their parents and people of influence created in these young people senses of insecurity and in some cases doubts about life in general.  We stayed up at night praying for so many of them and at times talking to them for hours about their struggles and encouraging them.  We tried to love them as best we knew how and became attached to many of them.  

A year or two after becoming the official youth leaders, one young lady developed a connection with me in an unhealthy manner.  She had grown so attached to me that if I connected with another girl in the youth she would find ways to sabotage the relationship.  It was subtle in the beginning, but it became more evident as time went on.  Soon after, she started dating a member of my family—giving her more access to me outside of youth functions.  I wasn’t wise on how I gave her access to my family, my home and allowed her into my personal life with no real restrictions.  Their relationship lasted for a little over a few months and it wasn’t a good fit.  When it came time for them to separate it wasn’t in a simple way and it was pretty nasty.  

Shortly after the break-up, she began to share the news that she may be pregnant.  It turned out that she wasn’t, but that led to the question of “Why would she think she was pregnant?”  It was at a youth gathering where she then told members of the youth that my family member had raped her; it was her word against his.  You can imagine how the coming weeks were.  Truth be told I would have preferred “weeks.”  This lasted months, years and even a decade.  As her youth leader, I needed to love her even when I would find out that at a retreat she gathered the girls into her room to give them the details of how my family member took her virginity.  It was not just tearing me up personally but affected my home life as well.  My family member wanted to know who I believed and if why I wasn’t defending his name.

I wanted this all to go away, even when she dated someone else she would still tell the story.  She didn’t hide who the person was and who they were to me.  My husband and I were questioned by people who didn’t even have children in our youth.  Any attempt on our part, from that point on, to discipline her if she did wrong was silenced because it was interpreted as us trying to get back at her.  During that time I prayed with her, cried with her and believed that God would do something within her to help bring healing for her hurt.  I think one of the most painful moments was when there was a women’s meeting and she proceeded to give testimony of being raped.  She graced me this time with keeping my family’s name out of it; however, those who had heard her story before knew who she was talking about.  

Keep Doing Right??

There were others, who did not believe her.  Her constant telling of her story began to show, and many became concerned for Sam and my ministry.  It became apparent at one point that she began using this experience to gain more sympathy from me and others.  She wanted me to love her, and whenever the attention wasn’t on her, the story would surface again.  I needed to pull away from her because I was losing my patience.   I developed connections with to other teens in the youth who weren’t so engrossing, and this made her even more jealous.  The story of the rape began to hold less ground in peoples eye so a new one was formed and at a secret meeting with some leaders of my church she proceeded to tell them that I was having an affair on my husband with one of the young men from the youth group.  She gave false testimony of relationships I had with the teen boys and, for reasons of their own, without speaking to Sam or myself once, they believed her.  

When we were finally made privy to the accusations, the leadership never asked if the accusations were true; they spoken to us as if the accusation was correct.  We were monitored and babysat like children. I was removed from my office position in the church and other things happened to Sam and me that’s not worth getting into.  All the while we met with our youth and had our services.  We poured into them as best we knew how.  And at each service and function there she was.  I didn’t know how to handle this and her.  My hands were tied on what I could do.  Along with other things going on between my husband and the leadership, I just became overwhelmed and wondered, “How much more could I take from her?”

Shortly after my family moved away, my husband took on a new ministry position, and we started a new life hoping to leave that nonsense behind.  After a few years, my husband and I planned to have a get together with the old teens, who were now young adults.  This young lady was now married and took the opportunity to place it on the internet what happened to her…again.   I wanted to scream because it was like she never wanted me to forget it; it was like she wanted everyone to remember and bring a cloud over what could be a great reunion.  

A week or so later I received a text message from her asking if we could talk.  I agreed to meet her, so we met at a Starbucks where we started talking about surface things and then she cut to the chase.  She admitted that she wasn’t doing well.  She had been living with a lot of pain and guilt, and she needed to confess.  She wanted to talk to me about what we knew but could not prove, that she was never raped by my family member.  She told me that they never even had sex—so the whole idea of her being pregnant was a lie as well.  She didn’t know why she created all the lies about me and why she tried to sabotage my relationships.  The driving force of her actions was to have a relationship with me, and she wanted acceptance.  So she was willing to do whatever, even develop a story that my family member violated her.  

Okay!  So Marsha what was your response you ask?  Well, truth be told God put me on auto-pilot.  It was like God shut me off at that moment because I KNOW that her confession should have propelled me to flip the table over and snatch her by the hair and let her face her maker but, instead, one of two things happened. Either God was not finished with her yet or he did not want me to start a prison ministry.  At the end of her confession, I turned it from my feelings and hurt to her getting her life right with God and getting herself back into church.  

So That’s It! I Forgave Her.  Yeah Right!!!!!! 

Two days after the confession God allowed my mind to be turned back on and I thought I was going to lose my mind.  The anger in me was so consuming that I thought I was going to go crazy.  In my frustration, I heard God say, “You need to forgive her.”  As I am writing this to you, a lump comes into my throat because I was so broken!!  The hurt I went through for years surfaced; like the trust, I lost from my family member and so much more that happened.  How could God ask me to do that after ALLLL she did to me?  My flesh wanted to destroy her. I wanted to stop being good and ruin her like she almost ruined mine.  My flesh was warring against my spirit like never before.  I could not bring myself to forgiving her.  I was slipping and slipping quick.  My anger was evolving into hate, and I could not stop crying.  God spoke to me again, “Forgive her.”   I did not answer God, and the longer I took to forgive her, the more I was being eaten from the inside out.

I was losing this battle quickly, I felt like God was saying the same thing to me that he was saying to Cain,

“Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast?  If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?  But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” Genesis 4:6

I called my pastor in pure hysteria and desperation.  He could barely hear what I was saying as I was telling him what happened and my battle with forgiving her.  I told him that I was desperate for his prayers.  As he prayed for me I felt the strength to face God in my raw state.  I was able to think a little bit clearer as I realized that she was at home, weight free because she confessed her sin to me.  I was the one tormented now—I was the one making my bed in my prison.  Remember un-forgiveness is not you holding the other person hostage, it’s the other way around as we learned in week one.

This person took enough from me, and I was not going to allow her to take one more thing.  It was then that I did what was right and let God to carry this burden from me and I forgive her—I let go of her offense against me.  That day, I chose to let God deal with her for what she did.  I did not forgive and FORGET.  That is stupid and impossible.  The bible never instructed that cause we can not naturally forget something as traumatic as betrayal, rejection, and abandonment.   It was a process and it was not an easy one by any means.  

Let’s talk because I know that we have all gotten to a place where forgiveness was the worse word ever.  The truth is though that un-forgiveness is like hating someone so much that YOU drink poison in hopes to hurt them.  Un-forgiveness is ONLY hurting you.  You may not believe it but you have no idea how your unwillingness to let go of the offense hinders you more than helps you.   Look at verse Cain did not forgive God for receiving his offering but God accepted Abel’s. Sin was knocking at his door and knocks on all our doors when we allow an offense to consume us.  

I want to make a challenge to you this week.  Get out a journal and list those who have offended you and why you feel like you can’t forgive.  Then I would like for you to write who is suffering more, you or them and how they are suffering and how your suffering.  Written out, you might see things better.  This is never an easy subject to address but know this, the only way to true healing and growth is through forgiveness.