Fagedda-bout-it!
freedigitalphotos.net
I caught a snippet of an old movie while channel surfing one evening. I didn’t stay with it long enough to get the title, but I do remember one line and it has remained with me. A tough-guy character from Brooklyn looked another tough guy in the face, grabbed his shirt with an angry fist, and raged, “Fagedda-bout-it! You’re making yourself sick. You hear?”
I shuddered at his tone, then flipped to another channel. But the warning, “Fagedda-bout-it,” thundered in my mind. Forget the pain of divorce. Forget the abuse at a mother’s hands. Forget the sting of a brother’s betrayal or the hateful words from someone you had counted as a friend?
However one expresses it, the demand is the same. Drop it! And then comes the hot poker to the heart. “You’re making yourself sick.” Someone has the nerve to tell you that you are making yourself sick when someone else was the perpetrator?
I’ve always wondered if anyone really can forget rejection, abuse, betrayal. And with all the hatred and vitriol in the news these days, it seems to be a tall order. The memory of the thing done to us is in our minds. It doesn’t just go away. Even if we can’t recall all the details. So telling someone to ‘fagedda-bout-it,’ that holding onto the pain is making him or her sick, that going over the details is hurting the wounded one more than the one who caused it in the first place does not sound productive or helpful to me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that these days as I watch people in the news share the wounds they’ve endured at the hands of others.
I remember Pastor Mark (the pastor of the church I attended in San Diego) saying one Sunday morning when I most needed to hear it, “Every future has a past, and whether we like it or not, God has given us the past as a gift to keep us oriented to our future.”
When we close the door on the past, when we try to simply forget about it, we hurt ourselves and everyone we love. Pastor Mark reminded us, however, that if we allow it, the past can be our guide to present understanding and future behavior. It can also be our friend if . . .
- We remember that Christ is for us–so who can be against us?.
- We repent of the choices we made that we didn’t have to make that may have contributed to the hurt.
- We receive God’s tender mercy through Jesus Christ.
We can then enter the process of becoming whole and being made clean. And then we can begin praying for those who persecuted us (Matt. 5:44) and for those we have persecuted by our hateful thoughts.
I have found that it’s almost impossible to hold a grudge against someone and pray for him or her at the same time–especially a mother or father, an adult child, sister or brother, friend or stranger!
Forgiving is a decision–not a feeling. It can be freeing to know that although our emotions may fluctuate from day to day, our commitment to forgiveness will keep us moving forward.
I hope those in power and politics can come to this understanding . . .
“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Ephesians 4:32
Amen to all of that Karen. We all need to forgive as we have been forgiven.
Learning lessons from our past, not living for the desires or wantings of the future and to do our best to stay present in the NOW with LOVE in our hearts and a smile on our lips with much gratitude.
Huge lessons. Working on them constantly. So glad to have you as my friend and reminder ❤️☘️😘.
Thank you, Kathleen. Well said, dear friend.
Excellent wisdom and a grabber of a lead, Karen! Thanks, as always, Carolyn Curtis, whose latest book is “Women and C.S. Lewis”
Thanks, Carolyn, and for mentioning your book, one of my favorites. I loved reading your perspective and those of other women on C.S. Lewis.
Great words, Karen. Just what I need to hear today. That is so true that it’s impossible to keep a grudge when praying for the person.
Thank you, Pam. I appreciate hearing that my words were useful to you.
Karen, thank you for a reminder of how important it is to forget about it and another way to put it is to : “letitgo” the one word that ‘Van’ on the comedy Reba made one night! He called it one word!
I ask your forgiveness for my example here because I feel like I have shared this before but as one person said, If it is worth saying once it is worth saying twice.> when my husband of 27 years said he did not love me anymore and felt we should get a divorce I was really stunned! I felt we had a good marriage. LONG story short: three months after the divorce he married his secretary who I really loved and had no idea they were having an affair. I was so angry and hurt and it was making me sick. Then I remembered a statement I heard in a message given by Georgia Harkness ( now deceased)back in 1948-did not remember the subject of her speech nor anything else she said but I thought of these words: “If someone does something to hurt you and you need to forgive them you do not ask God to help you forgive them. You ask God to Bless them!”
Why did this suddenly come to my mind after 26 years?! Well, I got on my knees by my bed and was honest with God and told Him I knew I could not fool Him and I really did not mean this but would He Bless ‘him and her’but I really did not want Him to! Those were the words I prayed to God each day for I do not remember how long and each time I closed my prayer with ” I really don’t want you to bless them”. The day did come when I did forgive and I felt a heavy burden lifted form me and I began to heal. We became friends again and visited with one another and after he died she and I still stayed in touch and still do and he died in 1983. I was sick but was made well with forgiveness. Not long ago I heard the statement: “Wisdom comes from listening” and I thought of my listening to Georgia Harkeness and how my listening really did bring me the wisdom to obey what I heard. PLEASE forgive me for repeating this but this example fit so well to the “forgetaboutit” and to “letitgo” that I had to share it again.
Love and blessing and thank you!!! Margaret
Margaret, we all benefit from your wisdom and experience whether you share once or even twice on the same topic. Your ‘share’ helped me more than you know. Thank you.
Wonderful challenge, Karen. While it is not always easy to let go of the hurts of the past – in fact, we can “let go” and then something happens and we take those hurts right back. Forgiveness is an ongoing process, but so necessary for our own healing. Thank you!
Thank you, Carol. I totally agree that the feeling of forgiving is a process even after we’ve made the decision to forgive.