Hate, Growth, and the Struggles In Between

I hate her.

I am not supposed to hate her.  It’s antithetical to the heart of my faith and my love of Christ to hate her.  Hating her is probably, spiritually-speaking, the one thing I absolutely and completely should not be doing.  But I hate her.

I don’t wish her ill.  Not completely.  I mean, I don’t want her to die or get sick or for anything permanently terrible or life-altering to happen to her.  And honestly, in an abstract, cosmic kind of way, I will her good.  I have told God things like, I hope you bless her and I don’t find out about it and I hope you bless her but please don’t use me to do it. 

I suspect God is not as interested in these shades of difference as I am.

I hate her because she deliberately, purposefully, maliciously hurt me so publicly and so awfully that people who didn’t even know us well took notice.  I hate her because I was kind to her, and she did it anyway, for no reason other than that she appears to be a monstrous human being.  I hate her because she did what she did to me right after my mother died, and she knew how close to my Mom I was, and being that level of nasty to a bereaved person is astonishingly awful.

I hate her because she’s never said she’s sorry in the slightest, and her response to other people calling her out on her behavior has been to get defensive and attack them, too.  I hate her because even now, after the fact, my stomach twists into knots when I see her and my eyes fill with tears.

I hate her.  Everybody else hates her, too—because of what she did to me but also because of what she’s done to a lot of people over a long time.  Nasty habits die hard, I guess.  She’s almost universally disliked and excluded.  I take pleasure in that when I know I shouldn’t.

I hate her, but I love God, and God doesn’t want me to hate people.  And by “doesn’t want me to hate people” I know I am supposed to do more than wish them well in an abstract sense.  I am supposed to love them and serve them and find ways to wash their feet.

I really hate her.

So I wake up and I pray.  I tell God, this is how I feel, and I can’t change it by myself, but you can.  I ask God to forgive me.  I tell myself that how I feel isn’t how I have to act.  I go about my normal day.  Sometimes I avoid her, when I know seeing her will make me think awful things.  Sometimes I’m able to engage with her in a civil way and it exhausts me but it’s manageable.  And once or twice I’ve managed to do a nice thing for her, though I have immediately negated God’s joy, I’m sure, by being mad it didn’t seem to ruin her day that I was so magnanimous.

The point is, sometimes being a Christian looks like this.

It looks like being caught between what we are and what we know we should be.  It looks like doing what we know we ought not do and don’t want to do, and yet somehow…do.  It looks like my desperate, flailing attempts to live out the virtues and the fruit God is developing in me when my sinful nature has not caught up.  It looks like asking forgiveness a lot.  It looks like trying hard. 

It’s ugly.

I think sometimes, in the church, we are comfortable only with pre-sin and post-sin Christians.  You know what I mean.  The Christians who talk about the sin they’re guarding against or the ones who talk about the sins they’ve overcome, and nobody mentions the rest of us all living in the middle who love Jesus and yet told a lie, or passed on gossip, or turned our wrath on our family, or had lustful thoughts, or contributed to dissent in the church, or hated someone.  We don’t know what to do with those people.  With us.

Years ago at my home church a local man would come in for every service.  He sat right in the middle of the front pew.  Cried the whole way through.  Went up to the altar every time.  Left and came back the next week.  He always smelled bad.  Always looked unkempt.  And later people told me: he’s a drunk.  He’s a pretty mean drunk.

I asked why we let him in, because he clearly wasn’t penitent enough or he wouldn’t be drinking any more.  If he took Jesus seriously, he’d stop.  I told my grandmother somebody ought to tell him to get his act together.  And my grandma gathered herself up and gave me that look and she said this:

“He ain’t botherin’ nobody.  Now if he does, then we’ll worry on it.  But he ain’t botherin’ nobody.  And if God welcomes him back every time he comes I ain’t going to do no different.  So when he comes I just say, ‘Lord Jesus, you have mercy on him.  And I say, Lord Jesus, have mercy on me.”

We are all here, in our places, struggling.

We all keep coming back.

God keeps welcoming us home.

I hate her.  But God helps me love her, too.  He’s changing me while He changes me toward her.  And one day He will have made me into a person who doesn’t hate her any more, one little bit. In the meantime, I try to remember His tolerance, I will be grateful for it and for the realization that my heart hasn’t grown so hard I can’t change, and the prayer I am able to pray is:

Lord Jesus, have mercy on her.

Lord Jesus, have mercy on me.