When Shelly and I met my best friend was a church of Christ minister in South Dakota.
He was very charismatic and had outstanding leadership abilities. In four years he grew a church of about 50 to around 400.
He grew the church in unconventional ways. He would do things like wait outside the bar all hours of the night watching and waiting. When he saw men or women coming out crying or fighting or drunk and trying to drive he would befriend them in the parking lot and drive them home if they were drunk or take them to breakfast and introduce them to grace.
He was one of the most humble men I ever met.
But like all of us he had his "thorn in the flesh". He craved attention and love from women that was somewhat lacking in his marriage.
Because of this he had several affairs over the years. He was very secretive and ashamed. Even I didn't know for a few years.
He prayed for help, even tried to move a couple of times to start over but this thorn kept returning.
During one particular time his effectiveness at church was diminishing and I finally convinced him to tell me why.
I told him he has to stop immediately. By this time he was having an affair with a deacons wife.
With tears running down his face he told me "I can't, I've been trying for years". His issue wasn't about sex. It was about companionship mixed with a little vanity and insecurity.
I told him if he didn't stop I would have to go to the elders of the church to force him to stop. Keep in mind, this man was my closest friend.
He bowed his head down in tears and said "Do what you have to do. I can't stop it".
So I went to them. They fired him immediately. If that wasn't enough the banned him from everything to do with the church including teaching at his men's ministry at the jail.
His wife kicked him out. Eventually allowing him to live in a small apartment over the detached garage
Instead of running and hiding he went forward and confessed publicly to the church and asked for their forgiveness and prayers.
He was met with a mixed reception, mostly bad from a congregation he had betrayed.
Still he didn't run. He was offered preaching jobs elsewhere but he took a regular job and showed up at church sitting on the back seat slipping in and out early to avoid conflict with those he had betrayed.
There were times I would go to visit him and look through the glass of his door to find him face down, completely prostrate lying in almost a foot across of tears in the carpet, praying.
We prayed a lot together that year. We talked about his need for companionship.
His wife talked with me many times. After a year she went out on a date with him. 6 months later she allowed him to move back in.
The church, however, in spite of the fact that he had continued to silently support all the things he was doing before like sitting with the prisoners at the jail ministry every week and attending all the worship services among hundreds of other things he quietly did to help, they still rejected him. Quite contrary to Paul's instruction in 2nd Corinthians.
Once he reconciled with his wife she could not accept the treatment he had humbly dealt with for a year and a half. So she convinced him to move their family to Texas.
She forgave him. Not because "it was a long time ago", not because it was "in the past" or because it was the "Christian thing to do"...... She forgave him because he asked...accompanied by a humble change of his former practices.
This is the biblical pattern for forgiveness taken through to it's end.
A few months before he was supposed to perform our wedding he informed me that he was moving his family to a small town in Texas to work at his father's ranch.
He thanked me for everything I did and apologized again for putting me in that position. He said he had found the companionship he had been craving all those years- with his own wife. She thanked me also with a smile I had never witnessed from her since we had met years before. She was a different person. She had learned to open up and love. He had learned to accept her faults. What they went through together made them cling to each other in a way that hadn't been possible before.
A few weeks later Shelly and I heard of a plane crash in icy weather on the news. One man was dead. We knew it was my friend immediately. He was the only person I knew who would have flown in that kind of weather. He was moving his plane to a cheaper hangar at another airport a few minutes away and crashed dying instantly.
He was 41 years old.
His wife, with her newfound confidence and positive outlook mourned for a few years, lifted her head up and later married a multimillionaire in Texas.
The moral of this story is this:
1st and second Corinthians gives us means for dealing with forgiveness.
Forgiveness requires confession and remorse. One can't even enter the kingdom of God without those two things. Why would God command us to "forgive and forget" as some say using a lower bar than he, himself uses for forgiveness? Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians to expose those doing wrong and even expel them if it comes to that.
But in 2nd Corinthians he makes it very clear that those who have asked for forgiveness and shown actions that support the concept of remorse need to be forgiven and accepted.
Now we, as humans, are not very good at judging the hearts of others. So God, in his providence, has given us a cheat sheet - just like pharaoh he hardens hearts to reveal their intent. In other words, God made is easy for us in many cases by hardening the heart of the wrongdoer and causing them to refuse to accept responsibility, confess, ask for forgiveness, or show signs of remorse.
This is not the case with my friend Carlos. He has humbly put his hand to the plow and worked his tail off and made his business succeed. He volunteered to work with the UAMCC with me, of all people, for the benefit of contractors.
Carlos is the perfect example of what this industry needs. We need men who have the courage to go outside the box, but with enough humility and a little less legal calculating that will allow them to say "I'm sorry" when a mistake is made
Then move on to fix it and THEN put it in the past
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