Forgiveness Means the Most When We Don’t Deserve It

My Accident.

When Steve’s email hit my inbox with this header, my heart sank. Oh no. What happened? Did he fall?

Steve is one of my spiritual fathers. An elder at our church decades ago, he and his wife, Pat, modeled godly parenting to my husband, David, and me as we sought to raise our young children in the faith. They had raised six boys and “adopted” many of the young couples in our church, modeling faith, family, and friendship. We’d connected further over our New England roots. When I felt homesick for Rhode Island, I’d seek out Steve and “talk some Yankee.”

When Pat died in her early sixties, Steve resigned his job at the Bible college in town and went back to the mission field in Micronesia. He served there until a stroke partially paralyzed the left side of his body and rendered his left arm useless.

Now eighty-something and frail, he walks with a shuffling step and a cane. “But the Lord’s not finished with me yet,” he declares, “so I keep going. It isn’t fast, and it isn’t pretty, but I get there.”

Except this time, he didn’t get there. Walking through a grocery store parking lot, he was struck by a car and knocked to the ground. “But thankfully not run over,” he wrote in his email. In his characteristic “in everything give thanks” style, he described his injuries: a fractured hip repaired with three screws, a fractured shoulder doctors said would heal on its own, and “quite a concussion.”

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I’m guest posting today over at Our Daily Bread’s God Hears Her blog. To read the rest of this post, click the link below.

https://www.godhearsher.org/blog/life-changing-power-of-forgiveness