Forgiveness Brings Freedom
Many people cling to resentments because they feel they’ve paid so dearly for them they can’t possibly give them up. Sometimes people’s entire lives are built around past hurts. They dwell upon their negative experiences and, in doing so, the anger is deeply repressed. But forgiveness is so important in our lives. This was Warren’s experience.
“My father and mother became my enemies; I grew up knowing only hate for them,” he says. “But the Bible says [Matthew 5: 44, 45] we should love our enemies—that we should ‘pray for those who persecute you,’ and that those who do become the sons of God.”
That was also Warren’s experience. Eventually.
He was the second born after his twin sister, but from the moment of his belated and unexpected arrival some hours after his sister, his father took a bizarre, pathological dislike to him, treating him like an outcast.
His home wasn’t in some depressed socioeconomic zone, but rural, with an orchard and space for his four sisters and himself to play. His mother was a perfectionist, meticulous in the details of house cleanliness and attention to the appearance of her children. His father was of powerful build, able to single-handedly lift a 200-litre drum of oil onto a truck tray. He was a hard worker and hard on his family. He was also an alcoholic!
Warren’s father referred to him as “Wog,” treating him appallingly, pathetically expressing some kind of personal emotional frustration associated with his own physical abuse as a child. But why would any father subject his own son to a regimen of sadistic punishments, beginning with a near boiling temperature teaspoon on the tender skin of an infant, Warren’s first memory of it.
He vividly recalls being dragged from a warm bed late at night to be deliberately vomited upon by his drunken father. Once, when mowing the lawn, the mower ran out of petrol. His father was in the shed sharpening a hunting knife when Warren asked for more petrol. Enraged, his father slashed him just above his knees, ordered him to bandage it up to staunch the flow of blood and then to wear long trousers to hide the tell-tale signs. But after three days when the wound became painful and unbearable and he was reluctantly taken to the hospital. The doctor was told Warren had been playing with a chainsaw.
Even his mother, who had tried to be supportive, turned on him, possibly in an attempt to gain some relief for herself from her husband’s brutality to her.
When he was 11, Warren made an impressive display of skill at a school rugby match, being awarded best player of the day after making a spectacular try. He describes the event as “the most precious moment of joy!” But this soon changed to the reality of incomprehensible shock when he was beaten for returning home in muddy clothes! He was left bleeding, shaking in fear on the laundry floor, warned never to play rugby again.
There’s a limit to what a nerve-hardened 12-year-old can endure. The boy who should naturally be dependent on his family was now experiencing an imposed independence that burst into rejection of his family. After a cruel beating one cold winter’s night, he decided it was time to let go. The dog kennel, with the wool rug floor and the warm body of the dog he’d killed, would keep him warm through the night! Let’s get this pain over with, so I can do other things today, he told himself.
But he was so emotionally disturbed, he was medically and psychologically assessed and placed in a mental institution, tied up in a padded cell. He was to return twice more that year.
Finally, Warren was put on a train, rejected by his family, to another institution, this time for the intellectually impaired. But it was an insitution for adults; there were no other children. It was an environment of bizarre behaviour—shouting, yelling, straitjackets and horrors bound to reinforce the damage already done to his impressionable mind.
Fortunately, after several interviews, the supervisor telephoned his parents and directed them to remove him.
“He would never have been admitted,” said the supervisor, “but for irregularities in the system.”
At home, life hadn’t changed, with loneliness, bitterness and hate for his parents. He trusted no-one, not even his siblings or peers. He decided to make a clean break, leave home and tell no-one where he was going. In this he would find freedom.
In fact he found a good job and began to live as any normal young man. Through absolute fear he made no contact with his family until well after two months, and then to only reassure them he was alive and well.
“But I got the distinct impression I hadn’t really been missed!” he says.
n Some years passed, then his father became ill and died. Warren was contacted and called home for his father’s funeral. But the terrible memories of home returned with a renewed impulse of anger he found difficult to control; he couldn’t bear to look at his father’s lifeless face. The anger built until he felt an urge to tip the casket off its trolley where it stood in the chapel. He hadn’t wanted his father to die of illness; he’d wanted to kill him himself, as he might have done if he hadn’t missed an earlier opportunity!
He remembered the incident—when he was 11. He’d just witnessed another cruel beating dealt his mother and was determined to make his father pay for this brutality. He took his father’s 303-calibre hunting rifle from the cabinet, loaded it and walked into his father’s room. He aimed the weapon with the barrel only centimetres from his father’s temple as he lay sleeping in a drunken state. As he began to position his finger firmly on the trigger, he heard a noise and turned to see his battered mother. She quietly approached him and gently took the gun, unloaded it and placed it back inside the cabinet.
Such were the memories that flooded back as he contemplated his early life, searching for some meaning to the events of his relationship with this man who lay cold in the casket, beyond the reach of retribution and any earthly effort of understanding or reconciliation.
With that chapter of his life closed, Warren eventually married and had his own family. But as his family grew up around him, he began to realise there was something different to what he had experienced. His wife and family showed him genuine affection and a love that developed in him a sense of dignity in his role as husband and father. He began to fully realise that he was a human being capable of being loved—and loving—without fear of rebuff or rejection.
This discovery of the reality of human love was soon to reach out to a new dimension. In talking to a friend, for the first time he learned something about Jesus Christ—a person who understood suffering and rejection, and who’d died a sacrificial death for the sins of the entire world. He learned about this Saviour’s gift of forgiveness—how it must be experienced to be believed, then shared with others who also need it.
He thought about his father. Could he have been forgiven by God? he wondered. Can I forgive him?
Then what might almost be called a miracle happened. For the first time in his life he broke down.
“I felt nothing but love for my father,” he says. “I yelled to the heavens, saying, ‘Lord, thank You for letting me forgive my father. Thank You for letting me love him at last. I feel so much at peace; I’m no longer afraid.’”
Warren was determined not to miss the opportunity to express his new-found love to his now dying mother. When he’d heard she was seriously ill, he visited her. He held her hands and asked if she believed in God. Although unable to speak, she nodded in the affirmative. Then she too handed her life to Him, with Warren leading her.
“We prayed together, as she took her final breath,” he says, “then peacefully passed away in my arms.”
“There seems to be one ‘selfish’ act that’s acceptable to God,” Warren says. “Forgiving another person is perfectly selfish. You do it so that you can be free. You forgive so that you can experience all the happiness and joy for which you were created.”
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