James’s Blog: The Inconvenience of Forgiveness.

I’ve just written a blog post.

But not this blog post.

I was reflecting on something that had happened to me years ago, and I thought the experience would make a good post. It was an interesting situation, personal and significant, with a strong applicable lesson at the end. In short, it was perfect blog material.

So I wrote it. It was pretty good.

But…

It was a story about how someone had let me down. The blog didn’t mention any names, but it had some specific details. It needed to, for the story to work. It had happened a long time ago, but anyone who knew my history might have been able to work out exactly who the villain of the piece was.

(Don’t worry. It wasn’t you. Probably.)

And that was a problem.

Because if I’ve forgiven, then I’ve made a decision to carry the cost of another’s sin. That means not dragging their name through the mud. It means protecting their dignity where possible. It means not naming and shaming.

So, I sat there with a perfectly good blog post (and those are an increasingly rare commodity, let me tell you) and I knew that if I really had forgiven, I couldn’t use it.

So I deleted it.

And wrote this instead.