Have you been name called? Have you had people talk behind your back, spread lies about you, stab you in places you didn’t see coming? Have wrongs been done to you that you wanted, desperately ad viscerally to put right with your own hands?
If so, you’re not alone. Neither am I.
I have lost count of the number of times I wanted to take matters into my own hands. The times the anger rose up hot and clean and I thought, I could deal with this myself. Right now and it would feel good. I grew up feeling wronged. By people, by circumstances, by a world that seemed to operate on a logic I couldn’t quite accept. And for a long time my instinct was to fight back, to match every wrong with a response, to make sure nobody ever got away with anything at my expense.
It took me a long time to understand that this instinct, as human as it is, belongs to a smaller version of me. A version that measures justice by what it can see and touch and immediately satisfy. God’s justice is something else entirely.
Leave His wrath to Him. Not as passive resignation, not as weakness dressed in spiritual language but as a genuine act of faith. Faith that the scales will be balanced. That nothing done in darkness stays hidden forever. That every wrong will be answered perfectly by a God who sees everything, everything you have suffered, everything that was done to you in private, everything you never told anyone.
He saw it. He sees it still and He will answer it.
The man who bears wrongs with dignity and faith is not a pushover. He is not naive. He has simply decided that God’s justice is worth waiting for and that his own peace of mind is worth more than the temporary satisfaction of revenge. There is a freedom in letting go that I cannot fully describe. Not the freedom of forgetting, you don’t forget. But the freedom of no longer carrying it as a debt that needs collecting. You hand it over. You walk lighter.
Let it go. Let God handle it. He will and He will do it far better than you ever could.
Well said. It can be a struggle but we must persevere. It is something I have struggled with all my life.
This is excellent advice. Justice is mine sayeth the Lord, I will repay.