Ready to Forgive

There is a way of being forgiven that costs more than not asking.

Anybody who has lived long enough has had it done to them. You bring a thing to somebody and they forgive you, genuinely, and there is a pause first. Then a breath. Then a sentence that begins with well. And you walk away with the matter settled and something in you smaller than it was, because the forgiving arrived correctly and it arrived slowly and you could feel every inch of the distance it had to travel.

Now, here is a woman who had that done to her once, about eleven years ago, by somebody who was not being cruel and did not know what they had done.

And she has never been able to bring anything to God since without expecting the pause.

That is what she braces for. Not refusal. She does not think she will be turned away. She thinks she will be forgiven the way she was forgiven that afternoon: correctly, and reluctantly, and with a breath in the middle that tells her exactly what it cost.

So she does not bring things quickly. She waits until a matter has gone quiet enough that she can raise it without much heat, and then she raises it carefully, and she is braced the whole time for a pause that has never actually come.

Eleven years of anticipating a breath.

That is you before you speak.

You've been expecting to be forgiven grudgingly. Not refused. Forgiven, correctly, at the end of a visible internal journey, and you have decided that this is what forgiveness feels like because it is what it felt like once.

The psalm uses one word about His posture and the word is ready

David says three things about God in a line, and the middle one is a word about posture rather than about action, and it is the one that undoes a pause.

For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee.Psalm 86:5

Ready to forgive.

Not willing. Not able. Not prepared to consider it. Ready, which describes a state a person is already in before anybody asks, the way a woman with the kettle already on is ready when somebody comes up the path.

Readiness is not a decision made at the moment of asking. It is what has been arranged beforehand.

You are asking Someone who was already in position before you opened your mouth, and readiness is a posture rather than a response, and I am not making a psalm say more than it does: Psalm 86:5 says ready to forgive, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that under eleven years of bracing.

Now look at what sits either side of it. Thou art good comes first, which means the readiness is not a special dispensation, it is an expression of what He is like generally. And plenteous in mercy comes after, which is a word about supply: not a measured amount released with care, but a great deal of it, on hand.

Nothing in that sentence has to travel a distance to get to you. That is the whole point of the three phrases together.

You have been anticipating a journey that does not need to be made, and the distance you have been listening for was closed before you came up the path, which is written into the word ready rather than into my sympathy for what happened eleven years ago, with the Spirit of God able to unclench something that eleven years has set.

Here is the plainest way I know to put it, and it is how the women in my family would have put it. There is a difference between a house where you are welcome and a house where you would be made welcome. In the first one the kettle is on before you knock. In the second one it goes on after, kindly, and everybody hears it going on.

Psalm 86 describes the first kind.

This is already on before you come up the path, and it has been for eleven years, because Scripture says ready, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a farmhouse in the late afternoon.