Open Hands, Closed Fists

It's easy to be gracious when people are kind to us. It's easy to love when love is being returned. But what about when it isn't? What about when someone hurts us, disappoints us, or treats us in a way we never would have treated them? I never want someone else's actions to determine the condition of my heart. I want to be hard to offend and quick to forgive. Not because everything people do is okay. Not because boundaries don't matter. But because I never want bitterness to begin growing where God is trying to grow love. I don't want to become less gracious because someone else was unkind or less loving. Above all, I don't want the way I've been treated by people to become more evident in my life than the way I've been loved by Jesus.

I've been thinking about how freely we ask God for grace, yet how cautiously we sometimes extend it to others. We come before Him with our shortcomings, our repeated mistakes, and the sins we promised we wouldn't return to, trusting that His mercy will meet us there. Yet when someone else falls short, how quickly do we become impatient? We ask God to forgive what we've done, only to keep a record of what others have done to us. And I wonder how often we forget that the very grace we hesitate to extend is the grace that has carried us our entire lives. We have been given far too much grace to become stingy with it.

In Matthew 18:21-35, Jesus tells the parable of a servant who was forgiven a debt he could never repay. Yet shortly after receiving that mercy, he demanded repayment from another servant who owed him far less. Every time I read this passage, I wonder how often we do the same. How often do we stand before God with open hands asking for forgiveness, only to turn around and extend grace with closed fists? The servant's problem wasn't that he had received too little mercy. It was that he had allowed the mercy he received to stop with him. Grace was never meant to end with us.

Romans 5:8 reminds us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Not when we had finally gotten everything right. Not when we had proven ourselves worthy of His love. While we were still sinners. Jesus knew every failure, every mistake, and every moment we would fall short, yet He still chose the cross. I think there is something deeply humbling about knowing that God has been endlessly patient with us, while we sometimes struggle to offer even a fraction of that patience to others. How can we spend our lives receiving a love we could never earn and then become so reluctant to give grace we were never meant to keep to ourselves?

Of course, forgiveness doesn't mean pretending we weren't hurt. It doesn't mean allowing people to repeatedly mistreat us or ignoring the wisdom of boundaries. We can forgive without restoring trust that hasn't been rebuilt. We can walk away without wishing someone harm. We can acknowledge what was wrong without allowing it to change what is right within us. Romans 12:19 reminds us to leave vengeance to God. We don't have to carry the burden of making every wrong right. Sometimes forgiveness is simply trusting God enough to release what we were never meant to carry.

Hebrews 12:15 warns us about allowing a root of bitterness to grow. And I think that's what makes unforgiveness so dangerous. It rarely begins as something we intend to hold onto forever. Sometimes it begins with a hurt we keep revisiting, a conversation we keep replaying, or an apology we keep waiting for. Slowly, what someone did to us begins to shape the way we see everyone else. I never want to become so consumed with what someone did to me that I lose sight of what God is doing in me. I don't want to spend my life keeping score when Jesus has already shown me what it means to forgive a debt I could never repay.

Maybe the greatest evidence that we've truly understood the grace of God isn't simply how grateful we are to receive it, but how willing we are to extend it. Because the cross was never meant to be something we only look to for our own forgiveness. It was meant to change the way we love, the way we respond, and the way we forgive. If the mercy of Jesus has been great enough to change our eternity, it should be great enough to change the way we treat one another.