A Word to Adult Children

Most adults have layers and layers of subconscious anger resulting from being loved insufficiently as a child.

Anger’s function is justice.  It is a reflex to perceived injustice.  All people know intuitively they should be loved.   Almost all people internalize, as infants and children, the anger of the injustice of poor love.

The only cure for these anger layers is to forgive the perpetrators, and the first perpetrators are our own parents.  There are books and books on this issue (both secular and Christian) and it is pointless to rehash them here. 

Many people are simply unable to forgive their parents.  This is because forgiveness is not simply an act of willpower; the ability to forgive comes in an instant of time with the revelation of what we have been forgiven.  Forgiveness is not possible absent the experience of being forgiven. This experience of forgiveness is a supernatural grace, and it instantly radiates the heart with a new and unexpected forgiveness extended to others, as if by a mysterious agent, almost without effort. Those who struggle with forgiveness have only a partial vision of what they have been forgiven.

Having said this, we are still responsible to forgive. Responsible, though feeling unable. Seen in this light, forgiveness is not a work of merit, arising out of discipline, but a grace of relationship to Jesus. Jesus tells us to forgive, true, but casts the command inside the connection to our vision of having been forgiven.

It is good news, then. What to do, especially when parents are gone, or are still alive but hard to love, and every conversation just picks at an old scab?

This advice is going to seem anti-climactic, but if you’ve felt trapped in bitterness for years, what do you have to lose? Do this: pray, every day, the Lord’s Prayer, and especially “forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me.” Then tell the Lord you forgive your parents for not loving you. And as you pray, mean it. Mean the part where you ask for YOUR sins to be forgiven. Confess any particular sins that float onto your mind as you pray. Do not list your parents’ sins yo God; He is not your therapist.

It matters not what you feel. It’s not a lie; God sees your heart, you are not tricking Him. Just place yourself every day, gently and quietly, inside the forgiveness container (if you will), and…He will work His work.