A person's wisdom yields patience; it is to one's glory to overlook an offense. Proverbs 19:11 NIV
Years ago I read a devotional that talked about offense and how it’s like catching a ball you don’t have to catch. Things come at you, but it’s a choice to “catch” them or to just let them drop to the ground. I’ve been thinking about this lately because I realized that I had been juggling balls of offense that I had “caught.
While getting ready this morning, I remembered a movie I about a group of people who decided to enter a dodge ball tournament in order to raise some money. One of the more memorable lines from the movie is “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball,” as the actor lobbed a pipe wrench at a young man that laid him out flat. This image showed me just how weighty offense can be and that it had waylaid me to such a degree that I was considering walking away from the place that had been the source of my offense.
I no sooner had this revelation when another childhood game came to mind — Hot Potato. Rather than keeping the hurt to myself, I passed it around like a hot potato, not realizing that it burned everyone it touched. I had failed to remember that the object of the game was to “drop it like it’s hot” and to not hold onto it because the one who holds onto it, LOSES.
We are in the season that tends to be the perfect opportunity for the enemy to lob his fiery balls of offense to distract from the reason that we celebrate.
Maybe we are gathering with family that we haven’t seen since last year because of what they may have done or said in the past, or maybe we have purged our Christmas card list of all the people who didn’t send us a card last year…or EVER! We often venture out in the spirit of giving, only to find ourselves miffed at some harried salesclerk because what we intended to give was “out of stock.”
I have been reminded — reprimanded actually, that the season should be a time of GRACE and GIVING. The greatest gift ever given is the reason why we celebrate. It was a gift given without any expectation of return to an undeserving and fallen world, freely and with great JOY!
We‘ve heard that iron sharpens iron, and when it does, sparks fly. When I am around those people, who “sharpen my iron” so to speak, I am choosing to let GRACE be the extinguisher that puts out the sparks before they blaze into offense.
I am quick to cry out for mercy whenever I make a mistake, but when others have done the same, I have tended to demand swift justice. To be honest, what I actually wanted was vengeance. Like the little child whose sibling was in trouble for hurting them telling my daddy to “spank ‘em, spank ‘em hard! He gently reminded me that He is a Loving Father who metes out mercy and grace, not vengeance; the same grace and mercy available to me every morning is available to others as well.
The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Lamentations 3:22 NLT
As we go through this season, let's endeavor to dodge those balls of offense and to drop them like they're hot if we do catch them. Can you imagine how wonderful next year will be if we did???
