The Power of Forgiveness

I have a younger brother whom I respect and admire a great deal. He is my father’s son by his second wife, so he is my half brother and considerably younger than I. I wasted a lot of years that I could have spent having a relationship with him because I resented him. I didn’t even know him, and I resented him.

My parents divorced when I was about twelve years old, and my father faded out of our lives. We had visits for a while, horrible visits that started and ended with fights between my parents and hours of grilling when we got home. My father remarried, and then he pretty much stopped coming around and drifted out of our lives. My father and his wife had my brother when I was fourteen and my sister was eleven.

Then my father and his wife adopted a son, then a developmentally disabled daughter, and then they became foster parents. We learned of this through the grapevine, since my father still lived in the same county. I would make an effort and visit now and again, but this was never reciprocated, and I felt sure that I was not welcome. It drove me crazy that my father had abandoned my sister and me and started a new family and took in every stray kid he came across. I resented my half brother because he had my father’s love and attention that had been taken from me and, in my mind, was my due. I always sympathized with Cain and Esau and the other displaced elder brothers in Bible stories.

Mrs Vache Folle says that children almost always have a favorite parent, and mine was my father. I idolized him and wanted to be with him as much as I could. Then he was gone. I expected him to rescue me from my abusive stepfather, but he never did, and I was heartbroken. I wondered what had been so wrong with me that my father did not love me.

I grew up, went off to college, married and returned only rarely to my hometown. I lost touch altogether with my father and tried not to think about him. The resentment still festered beneath the surface, though, and to try to resolve it I decided to abandon my father’s name. I changed my name legally, and this kind of helped me to put my issues with my father behind me. I decided to forget all about the old man.

About five years ago, I realized after a sermon on forgiveness and some soul searching and prayer that I still needed to resolve the matter of my father and my resentment of him. I decided that I would reach out to my father and forgive him and try to salvage some kind of relationship. I knew that it would be up to me to make the move and to keep up any contacts.

My father seemed sincerely elated to get my call and was almost in tears. We started calling and e-mailing one another regularly (I was shocked that my father has actually initiated contact from time to time), and I have visited him in Georgia on several occasions. We have a better relationship than I would have imagined, and I am freed of the burden of resentment. In the bargain, I have gotten to know my brother and his children, and I aim to cultivate the relationship better than I have so far. I should not have resented him, since growing up with our father was not all beer and skittles, and I am glad to have that behind me as well.

Whenever I have practiced forgiveness, it has been a great benefit to me. I have some more resentment agianst my stepfather that haunts me, and I am praying to be able to forgive him and get out from under the weight of it as well. Having had some spectacular failures in life made it a good bit easier for me to be more forgiving of others. Moreover, seeing some of my peers fail in marriage and at parenting made me realize that nobody sets out to be an absent father or an abusive stepfather.