And Thereby Hangs a Tale by David Teems

Author:David Teems
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780736927161
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers

Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

REVELATION 19:10

to err is human, to forgive is all dog

Dogs are able to forgive with an ease you and I are incapable of. Perhaps time—or rather their indifference to time—has something to do with it. To forget requires time, linear, sequential time, which has no influence, no power over dogs. If I have no past, where am I to list all the offenses against me? Where is the record to be kept?

There could be other explanations. The dog’s ability to forgive may be due simply to her outrageous capacity to love. Perhaps love has such sovereignty over her that it suffers no obstacle. Unforgiveness is an obstacle. It is a stone in the shoe of love.

When we live in the immediate, in the wonder of now, in that paradise present, we remove the venom from the past. It no longer has a voice within us. Love remains sovereign, making forgiveness much lighter work.

God forgives completely. One reason is that he gives himself no past to look back on. Time is less of an issue for God than it is for the dog. His sea of forgetfulness is a vast one. I do not understand it, and though I do not question it (that much), it nonetheless amazes me how an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God can allow himself to forget. But this is his choice.10 In his great love, he has given himself no option. Unforgiveness is incompatible with love.

You and I are not so fortunate. We build memorials to time—real ones and imaginary ones. We labor long and hard to ensure their durability, their resilience to the elements. We tend to keep long and detailed records of offenses. Unlike the dogs, and unlike God, we have a past to store them in and we call them up at will. Some of us, if not most of us, go so far as to find strange comfort in them. This is an odd psychology the dog doesn’t suffer. For you and me, though time is linear, memory unfortunately is not.

How liberating it would be to forget. How redemptive. How much easier life would be if I were not haunted by the meddling and unkind ghosts of my past. These lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth were too good to pass over. Macbeth is seeking help from his doctor because Lady Macbeth is troubled:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the oppress’d bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, MACBETH

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