The Transforming Power of Forgiveness

Over the course of our lives we come across certain places we will always remember.  We encounter certain individuals we will never forget.  We live certain experiences that forever will be indelibly seared at the forefront of our memory.  Sometimes, once in a lifetime, maybe twice, all three elements combine to create a happening, a phenomenon of sorts, an event that changes who we are, sending our lives through a series of transformations, shaping us in new dimensions.  For me it happened in a war zone, in a place of ethnic cleansing, a land of unspeakable atrocities, inside Bosnia.  The place was the city of Mostar.  The person was a Muslim woman who found Jesus.  The experience was an implausible lesson of forgiveness heard with my ears, seen with my eyes, felt with my heart.

Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a painful and devastating ethnic war between Serbians, Croatians, and Muslims with the break-up and collapse of the former Yugoslavia.  During this period, the city of Mostar was overwhelmed by Serbian military units, and shelled from the surrounding mountains.  A campaign of ethnic cleansing began, forcing the majority of people from their homes.  Over one hundred thousand individuals were displaced.  Thousands lost their lives.  Of those who survived, many were the victims of unspeakable crimes.

Mostar sits at a strategic crossing of the Nretva River.  Its hinterlands consist of a broad agricultural plain on the west bank and steep terraces on the east surrounded by barren mountains.  For centuries it was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural settlement.  During the war the city became a carcass.  Serbian soldiers gang raped Muslim women with one goal in mind—impregnating a Muslim woman with a Serbian baby.  The systematic raping shredded the ethnic, tribal, and social fabric.  If a Serbian soldier refused to rape, he could be shot by his comrades and no questions were asked.  Some soldiers forced Muslim men to use their own teeth to castrate their sons, and the sons were forced to castrate their fathers.  This type of filth and squalor barbarism, coupled with other merciless and ruthless acts of personified evil, created calamitous conditions.  The malevolence was so cruel, traditional enemies were forced to unite to drive the evil out.

A Croat-Muslim alliance was able to push the Serbian army back and expel them from keeping Mostar in their grip.  Within months the alliance fell apart.  It was then that an all-out ethnic, religious, and civil war broke out and completely destroyed the city, turning neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend.  It was in the context of this environment that I arrived in Mostar.  It was there I met one of the most amazing individuals whose life taught me an astounding lesson on forgiveness.

You could not understand the smile, the joy, if you knew her story.  You could, if you knew her Savior.  She had the biggest, most dazzling, most brilliant smile--infectious and radiant, like an exploding sun, leaving everything and everyone brighter.  She glowed with a radiance, a shining, revealing a joy that was contagious.  Despite every disadvantage she suffered, despite every tragic wound, she was filled with a gleaming, unwavering faith that she knew could transform her people, her city, her nation.  Where others saw rubble, she saw repair.  Where others saw wounds, she saw healing.  Where others saw death, she saw life.  She believed in an opaque future that she was sure, unquestionably sure, would one day be glorious.  She was unshakeable in this thought for she had experienced the power of forgiveness.

Jasmina Dankovic lost everything in the war, everything she owned, everyone she loved.  She had been forced to scale the mountain of pain.  They had killed her husband and two young boys.  They had crushed her strength and her courage.  They had shattered her hope and her spirit.  Now she was on the final leg of her journey.  She sat in her bombed-out home and saw her last hopes.  Then darkness.  Then Jesus.  Then hope.  Then healing.  Then life.

She woke up after a dream and found herself lying on the floor covered in debris.  The last thing she remembered was sitting on her bed wanting her life to end.  Suddenly there was a cacophony of noises, bright flashes, and fragments of concrete exploding all around.  Then darkness and silence.  She thought she had crossed the line.  A man came to her in a dream.  It was not someone who wanted something from her.  It was not someone who was going to hurt her.  It was someone who loved her.  He had nail-scarred hands and spoke these words "Follow me and you will find peace."

Awakening, she stumbled from the rubble and looked for a church.  Most were destroyed or blown up.  She heard there was one that established itself on the frontline, the street that divided all warring factions and their claimed territories.  Supposedly, it was a neutral zone, a small sliver of peace in the midst of mayhem, a place of refuge on snipers alley, the exposed stretch of road that separated conquered and unconquered territory, the road that divided good from bad.  After a few hours she entered this haven of hope and walked right into a prayer meeting.  She describes what happened next, "After a lifetime of practicing my Muslim faith, I felt the presence of God for the first time.  I collapsed in exhaustion, began to weep, and all the hurt and anger seemingly flowed from my innermost parts.  Those in the prayer meeting gathered around me and prayed for me.  I invited Christ into my heart to be my Lord and Savior.  I was completely changed at that moment.  Overnight, I had this unbelievable love for my people, for my city, for my nation.  I knew the only answer for my land was forgiveness."

Over time, Jasmina grew in her faith and shared with others her transforming experience and the peace she had found.  She started underground prayer meetings throughout Mostar – in places she was a friend, in places she was an enemy – calling them gatherings of peace and healing.  One night she took me on a journey to one of these secret services.  We set out just before dusk on a cold evening filled with leaden skies and wind blown snow.  Crossing a temporary footbridge of planks and ropes swaying and bouncing with every step, we entered enemy territory.  Hurriedly we made our way through darkened streets of damaged buildings.  Fog rose from ruins in a clinging ragged aura, seeping from shattered windows, puffing its way through bullet-holed structures.

After some time, we snuck into a bombed out edifice, opened a hatch in the ground and climbed down a wooden ladder into a basement of sorts.  In front was a large door with iron hinges.  Three coded knocks.  Silence.  In a timed fashion, three more knocks.  Dead silence, and then the slightest of noises, the sound of voices quietly singing.  After thirty seconds, the door slowly opened and we were greeted by the soft warm glow of candlelight.  Reflections of orange and yellow flickered off the walls.  Inside, holding hands, singing and praying together, united in love, were representatives of all warring factions of Mostar.  There was no sign of the war that enveloped them; there was no hint of hatred for the hurts they all suffered.  They all had three things in common.  They had seen death, they had lost loved ones, and they had experienced the transforming power of forgiveness.

In the Balkans, I felt as nowhere else I had ever been the chronic, constant presence of evil.  In a world of unspeakable atrocity, forgiveness seemed irrational.  My experience in Bosnia filled my mind with questions.  How could a war be conducted by rape, murder, and genocide, targeting innocent civilians?  How did perpetrators explain themselves to themselves?  How could anyone commit such acts upon another human being?  Unless you understood the history of the conflict, you could not find the answer.  The Serbs never forgot the battle for Kosovo in 1389, when the ottoman Turks defeated them and began the 500 years subjugation of Christian Serbia by the Muslim conquerors.  During World War II, Nazi Germany included the Serbs in their ethnic cleansing campaign.  Hundreds of thousands of Serbs were exterminated in Hitler's goal to establish a perfect race.  Aligned with the Germans, assisting in their effort of genocide were the Croatians. The answer to my questions was found in one word, one word alone, unforgiveness.

Where unforgiveness reigns, revenge is mandated.  For every atrocity there must be an equal and opposite atrocity.  Evils arise from not forgetting.  Terrible evils.  One round of unspeakable acts and killings somehow justifies the next round, conducted in the opposite direction.  In the logic of the victim, not to strike back would betray ancestors and the sacrifices they had made.  But the law of revenge never settles the score; it never gets what it wants.  It ties both the injured and the injurer to a rollercoaster of pain.  The ride never ends as long as parity is demanded.  Histories of nations, their rise and fall, borders shifting, point this out.  The stories are the same.  Only the names change.  Auschwitz.  The Killing Fields.  Somalia.  Darfur.  Kashmir.  Omagh.  Kigali.

Unforgiveness is a wandering presence in the world, metastasizing here and there, descending into places where it finds conditions ripe.  It has an unfortunate transformative effect, turning the lowest, most rotten impulses of human behavior into something darkly grand and important.  People justify unforgiveness in their minds and hearts by feeling sorry for themselves, marinating in self-pity.  They solve their formidable moral problem by declaring themselves the injured party, the victim.  A sense of narcissistic self-pity that is merely contemptible in an individual is transformed to heroism in this context.  What normally would be individual shame now becomes shameless, virtuous and honorable.  Evil portrays itself as injured innocence, fighting back, protecting truth, fueling the cycle of unforgiveness, and justifying acts that are incomprehensible.  This is what happened in Bosnia.  This is what happens in families, relationships, and marriages on a daily basis throughout our world.  And sadly, this happens in the church, among the people who are called to spread a life-changing message of hope and healing.  What stops the cycle?  Only forgiveness.

Forgiveness frees and releases.  It permits all parties to lay the past to rest and to proceed with a new beginning, uncontaminated by the infections of past wrongs, halting the cycle of blame and pain.  We remain bound to people we cannot forgive.  Forgiveness is the only way to release ourselves.  Not to forgive imprisons us in the past and locks out all potential for change.  We yield control to another, dooming ourselves to suffer the consequences of the wrong over and over.  We forgive for ourselves, not just to fulfill some higher law.  Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame.  Through it we realize we are not as different from the wrongdoer as we think.

Forgiveness unlocks new blessings.  Often we can't see ahead to the good things that forgiveness would bring to our future when we are confronted with the need to forgive.  There is a part of us that likes to control, to play the victim.  It's an attempt for us to feel vindicated.  But unforgiveness never vindicates.  It binds and it steals, robbing us of who we can become, of what we can become, destroying our minds and our hearts, devouring the present and severely impairing the future.

Forgiveness does not change the past, it changes the future.  It births new dreams and new hopes.  God will enable you to live in a new realm if you do things His way.  He will give you supernatural strength and love you could never conjure up on your own initiative, causing miracles to take place, giving you feelings and emotions you never dreamed you could experience again.  And He can do this in the midst of your pain.  He can heal your marriage.  He can mend your family.  He can repair your life.  He did this in Mostar, inside Bosnia, in the heart of a woman who experienced the horrors of genocide.  He can do this for you.

Yangshao

Silence.  For a long while I stood in a prism of Chinese air, drinking in the tonic of the mountains.  I am surrounded by a grand mountainous landscape free from the mark of man.  Spending time in a place like this, one is reminded of what is truly important.  The scenery does the talking.  Through God's craftmanship lectures are heard.  Values are re-shaped.  Lessons are learned.  Serenity is discovered.

Only a few hours earlier, I stood in the fast lane.  Allow me to take you there.  Cars speeding by.  Bicycles pedaled frantically.  Voices heard in all directions.  Phones ringing.  Vendors shouting.  Sidewalks filled with thousands of individuals, all being pressed by some agenda.  They arrive and meet from a variety of places.  Offices.  Schools.  Stores.  Trains.  Taxis.  They cross paths for a few seconds and off they go to another destination.  The sidewalk is a mere juncture on the path of life.  Every person carries with them a sense of purpose.  Wrinkled foreheads.  Unwavering eyes.  Accelerated strides.  All have one thing in common.  Finish the project.  Complete the deal.  Accomplish the task.  This is life in the fast lane.  Many spend all their time here.  Tragic.

More than likely, you have been in the fast lane this week.  Maybe today.  Life has become hectic, jumbled, overwhelming.  There seems to be little time for the things you really want to do.  And just when the moment arrives that you have blocked out for yourself, your family, your spouse, an emergency seems to arise.  The result, cancel the activity that will cause you to slow down and move back into the fast lane.  Good-bye Serenity.

Today I took some time to ponder and reflect.  After a few hours of writing and thinking I came to this conclusion about most lives in the modern world: importance is measured by how busy we are and by what we are accomplishing.  We tend to derive our worth, our value through our busyness and productivity.  The more we do, the more we are involved, the better we feel.  Earning our worth, not realizing this false illusion of value has a high cost.  Along the way we pay a severe price – families, relationships, memories, discovery.  Life was not created to be lived like this.  Sometimes we need to let go and bring balance to our lives by involving ourselves in activities which are truly important, acts which truly matter, moments that brings the greatest joy and most rewarding pleasure.  Play with your children,  do something special for the love of your life,  phone your parents and tell them how much they mean to you, visit grandparents and brighten their world, write that special letter,  find that perfect card, and spend some time alone to think, to reflect, to ponder, to discover the beauty of serenity.  I did ... in Yangshao.

The boat is only six feet wide.  The stools are eighteen inches high and when I peer over the edge, the Li River comes within inches of rushing inside.  The craft is propelled by a small outboard.  It makes a loud clattering noise.  The skipper is wearing a white polyester shirt, black slacks, and maroon socks.  He is navigating the bends and twists of the glassy greenish-blue as it winds its way through mountains whose splendor and grandeur are beyond description.  He cuts the motor and I am surrounded by the serenity of the most picturesque formations in the world.  I feel as if I have drifted a thousand years back in time.  The sound of the river is like a mantra, its current like a metronome.  The river is approximately sixty meters wide with run-offs here and there begging for exploration.  The left bank is lined with bamboo trees.  On the right, two water buffalo play along the shallow edge.  Directly above, a man methodically pushes his plow in green and brown rice paddies.  A fisherman floats by standing watchfully on a makeshift raft – eight logs bound together – guiding his drift with a bamboo stick.  Everywhere I look, I am encircled by lush green mountains.  No roads lead into this serene dreamland.  Only waterways.

The Chinese call Yangshao God's homeland. One cannot argue with them, the beauty is breathtaking, awe-inspiring, uncorrupted by tourism.  Time has not changed a thing here.  The local people are dressed as they have been for hundreds of years.  In this part of the world there is no such thing as fashion.  Nothing is in or out.  Life is about what you have, not what you want.  There is no need for anything more.  Beauty is found in the simple.  In the stillness of these pristine surroundings, I have rediscovered that life's greatest values are not seen through the eye, they are felt in the heart.  Sometimes the greatest challenge is not in speeding up, but in slowing down, and discovering while drifting, that serenity is the place where the still small Voice is truly heard.  The greatest joys in life come not from accomplishing; they come through discovering.  Usually, our greatest discovery is found in solitude, the most serene moment.

As I prepared to go to bed tonight, the southern lights of the universe came out, faintly at first, because dusk still lingered, but with growing intensity, and I stood to marvel at the green mountains staring at me from the distance.  Only one other night have I felt so drawn away to another world and that was in Zermatt, Switzerland at the base of the Matterhorn.  On that night the moon had tucked itself behind the famous peak, creating a silhouette illusion, causing one to feel the greater forces in this life at work.  Stars danced across the sky, singing and causing my heart to long to be with the Maker of all things.  That night, the stars were singing His anthem, paying tribute to the One who gave them light.  Tonight they are singing a different song as the summer moon smiles in the heavens and quietly hides tomorrow like a secret ... in Yangshao.

Love That Will Not Let Go

They were beautiful.  They were gorgeous.  They were the youngest of four sisters, identical twins, darlings of their family and their quaint Romanian village.  They looked like two precious porcelain dolls in their matching burgundy dresses adorned with cute curly bows accentuating their long, lovely locks.  And at the age of ten, they were thrown into an unimaginable nightmare with their arrival at the concentration camp known as Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Holding hands, refusing to let go, they clung to each other as they entered the closest imitation of hell, a man-made world of torture, agony and anguish.  They entered alone.  Moments earlier, their dad, mom, and two older sisters were torn away, torn from their lives forever.

They arrived on a train.  For four days they were packed together like caged animals without food and water.  The car was filled with sounds of despair; broken mumbled prayers of desperation, dispirited words of assurance to horrified children, weeping cries of fear and worry.  The doors of the cattle car were thrown open and for the first time in days they saw light.  They felt air.  They were touched by wind.  Standing next to their parents and older sisters, Eva Mozes held tightly to her twin sister Miriam's hand as desperate men and women climbed, trampled, and pushed each other out of the car in which they were entombed.  Shoved onto the platform, they were frightened and confused.  They stood there in utter terror, two little ten-year-old girls in matching burgundy dresses.

They sensed something awful was about to happen.  Sounds around them escalated.  Everything started moving faster and faster.  Nazi guards started grabbing people--pushing, pulling, shoving, kicking.  Family members were torn from one another.  Husbands from wives.  Children from parents.  Brothers from sisters.  Within seconds a guard noticed their matching dresses and shouted "Zwillinge! Zwillinge!"  Twins! Twins!  SS guards rushed over and grabbed Eva and Miriam.  As they were pulled from their mother's grasp, they reached back screaming and crying "Mommy, Mommy, Don't let us go! No Mommy! Don't let us go!"  It did not matter how much they cried and how loud they screamed.  With each step the SS guards took, their mother's flailing arms, wailing cries, and anguished tears faded as they were dragged away.  They would never see her again.

Hours later they were herded into the care of one of history’s most iniquitous men, a man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.  After losing their entire family, they were to experience evil beyond imagination.  They were thrown into a melee of daily sadistic medical experiments created specifically for twins-- group nakedness, castrations, unneeded blood transfusions, probing of their body cavities.  Weekly, the sisters received countless shots, some to extract, most to inject.  Syringes were filled with diseases, solutions, and unknown liquids. In an atmosphere of children sobbing, their cries resonating the most unimaginable pain of human suffering, Eva and Miriam would not let go.  They would not give up.  Over and over, they told themselves:  just one more day, just one more experiment, just one more shot.  These were not grown adults who already learned the ways of life by being exposed to the dark side of human behavior.  No, these were little girls who knew only of innocent life, innocent love, innocent days, innocent times.  Until the Angel of Death.  Until Auschwitz.

Inside the camp they lay in a wooden bunk on a straw mattress still clothed in their matching dresses.  Grieving for their lost family, cradling each other, they cried and cried. The pain of separation crushed their already shattered hearts.  In the middle of the night they had to use the latrine.  Amidst the darkness they hurried to the back of the barracks.  The latrine had no toilets.  Only holes in the floor.  Vomit and human feces were everywhere.  Stepping inside, they froze.  On the floor were the dead bodies of three naked children.  Miriam trembled and wept.  Eva stood in horror.  In that moment, Eva vowed to do everything in her power to make sure they survived.  She grabbed Miriam's hand and held it in a death grip as they returned to their bunk.  Crawling in, holding each other tightly, Eva spoke softly in Miriam's ear, "One day we will walk out of this place alive."  Love would not let go.  They would give their blood, their bodies, their pride, their dignity.  They would not give their lives.

The commitment, determination, and fierce resolve of love was seen the first time Eva and Miriam were separated at Auschwitz.  Eva was sick from an injection believed to be scarlet fever.  During the night she ran a high temperature.  Her head pounded.  Her skin burned.  Her body shook violently.  Writhing in pain, shivering with chills, standing in the lab, she tried not to tremble.  If seen in this condition she would be taken to the infirmary, the barracks of the dead and dying.  No one ever returned.

After some time, Eva was noticed.  Immediately she was thrown in a jeep and hauled to death's door next to the gas chambers and flaming chimneys.  Bunks were filled with people who were half dead.  No one was fed.  Food was not wasted on the dying.  Lying in her bunk, surrounded by death, Eva could not sleep without her sister by her side.  Her little fragile heart ached for her other half, the only person she had left in the world.  In the dark she heard nothing but moans and screams.  The screams of the dying cut into her.  When she closed her eyes, she saw Miriam's face.  She could not leave her alone in this world.  Through the tears, through the pain, through her broken spirit, she told herself repeatedly "I must survive.  I cannot die.  For Miriam."

The next morning a truck came to pick up the sickest and took them to the gas chamber.  Eva was passed over.  She pressed on without food and water and medicine.  Resilient love.  "I must survive.  I cannot die.  For Miriam."  On the third day she saw a faucet on the back wall of the infirmary.  She needed water for any chance of survival.  On sheer determination alone, she slid from her death bed and crawled on the rough cement, scraping and cutting her skin.  One at a time, she stretched her hands forward, dragging her lifeless limbs along the floor covered in human excrement.  At times she passed out.  When she awoke, she inched onward. "I must survive.  I cannot die.  For Miriam."  The love for her sister overpowered the pain.  Every night, for two weeks, she made the nightly trek for water.  Fourteen days later, her fever broke.  A death camp could not extinguish the love of a ten-year-old girl.  Love crawls, it holds on, it finds a way to survive in pain, pushing through hate and evil, never letting go.

Toward the end, days from liberation, Allied armies attacked the area around Auschwitz.  Bombs lit up the sky.  Heavy artillery shook the ground.  The whole world seemed on fire.  Bedlam and pandemonium broke out inside the camp.  Everywhere people were running for their lives.  Nazi occupiers disappeared.  SS guards were no longer found.  Prisoners ran for cover, clinging to their last thread of hope.  In the confusion, the sisters were separated.  Eva frantically searched for her twin among the huddled masses of emaciated individuals who were indistinguishable.  She scanned identical faces of grief and pain, staring into sunken hollow eyes encased in dark circles.  Every thirty seconds she screamed "Miriam! Miriam!" among the thousands ensnared in mortal fear.  Terrified tears streamed down her face as the hours passed.  Day turned to night.  Night turned to day.  She would not give up.  Her love would not let go.  In a near-stupor of desperation and exhaustion, she stumbled through a doorway, bumping into someone her height.  As she turned to look, Miriam collapsed in her arms.  Gripping one another, squeezing as tight as they could, they fell to the ground kissing and hugging.  Tears poured from their eyes.  Pulling away slightly, Eva caressed her sister's face and fiercely whispered again and again "Always hold my hand Miriam, always hold my hand.  Never let go, promise me you will never let go."

On their last day in the world's worst death camp, as they walked away from evil and suffering that few, if any, could truly comprehend, there were no matching dresses and curly bows.  There were no long locks and beautiful hair.  There were no older sisters, no mommy, no daddy.  There were matching lice infested striped uniforms.  There were shaved heads and deep scars.  There were gaunt faces and skeletal figures.  But for all that they lost--their family, their innocence, their homeland--they gained something that was powerful and astonishing.  They discovered the true essence of love.  They grasped its depths.  Somehow, somewhere, in the darkest darkness they understood love does not abandon.  It continually hopes.  It never gives up.  And it always believes.  Walking one last time through hell's gates under the infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei, they left the same way they entered, holding hands.  Love never lets go.