Forgiveness - the cement of true Christian community

I witnessed a true miracle yesterday. It was the miracle of forgiveness.

The heavens opened up and the Spirit of God fell and forgiveness flowed and......God smiled.

We are never more like God than when we forgive.

It's the cement, the glue of Christian community. Community is not possible without the willingness to forgive one another "seventy-seven times" as Jesus put it in Matthew 18.

Forgiveness is what holds us together through good and bad times, and it allows us to grow in mutual love.

In his book "What's so Amazing About Grace," Philip Yancey writes that Unforgiveness, "plays like a background static of life for families, nations, and institutions. Unforgiveness is sadly our natural human state. We nurse sores, go to elaborate lengths to rationalize our behavior, perpetuate family feuds, punish ourselves, punish others - all to avoid the most unnatural act of forgiving."

He is right.

Forgiving is a commitment not let let feelings of resentment come between us and those who have wronged us.

It's a choice - not a feeling.

On the morning of October 2, 2006, a troubled milkman named Charles Carl Roberts barricaded himself inside the West Nickel Mine Amish School, ultimately murdering five young girls and wounding six others. Roberts committed suicide when police arrived on the scene. It was a dark day for the Amish community of West Nickel Mines, but it was also a dark day for Marie Roberts—the wife of the gunman—and her two young children.

But on the following Saturday, Marie experienced something truly countercultural while attending her husband's funeral. That day, she and her children watched as Amish families—about half of the 75 mourners present—came and stood alongside them in the midst of their own blinding grief. Despite the crime the man had perpetrated, the Amish came to mourn Charles Carl Roberts—a husband and daddy.

Bruce Porter, a fire department chaplain who attended the service, described what moved him most about the gesture: "It's the love, the forgiveness, the heartfelt forgiveness they have toward the family. I broke down and cried seeing it displayed." He added that Marie Roberts was also touched. "She was absolutely, deeply moved by the love shown."