A Time to Forgive

When I was 4, life changed dramatically. My widow- mother remarried, so my stepfather moved into Mommy’s room, displacing me down the hall to a dark, lonely room.

Our family dynamics, previously filled with love and safety, suddenly became dominated by fear and turmoil. My alcoholic stepfather vented his frustrations on my mother, brother and me with words of anger, condemnation and humiliation. The leather belt, the wooden spoon and even wire coat hangers became weapons of cruelty and abuse.

Enough already!

By the time I was a teenager, the abuse gravitated from physical to emotional as he woke me up at 5 a.m. to clean the toilet, wipe his spit from the tub or scrub the floor. By the time I was 17, I had seen and endured enough.

One late night, when he came home intoxicated and began to abuse my mother, I lost my senses. A volatile confrontation ensued as I ignored the 16-inch height difference and stood up to him.

For whatever reason, he never drank after that. Months later, after not speaking to one another, he gave me a hope chest as a way of apologizing for his actions.

As the years passed, my stepfather remained just that — a stepfather. I became a Christian when I was 20 and began to work through forgiveness step by step, but the emotional damage was deep and haunting. I’d forgive one thing, but another memory would pop up. Other times he’d regress into another of his verbally abusive tirades.

Heart change

Then came my stepdad’s bout with cancer and my husband’s abandonment and our subsequent divorce. God had obviously worked in my stepdad’s heart, because when my husband left, God mercifully gave me a father and left the “step” behind.

My father provided for me financially and loved me as a daughter in a way I’d not known. He encouraged me to finish my education — even paid for it — and he supported me through the abandonment by my husband.

When my father’s cancer came back and he was diagnosed with only a few months to live, I knew I had to clear the air. I had to write him a letter.

The last letter

As a child, I had filtered my memories through my emotions, and in so doing I forgot the attempts to care for me by the person who also brought me pain. Yet in the process of pouring out my heart on paper, I not only forgave him formally for the hurts, but I exercised my memory to recall the good things he had done. I prayed, and I probed the recesses of my mind to remember what I had buried.

I told him how I appreciated the time he spent teaching me woodworking and handyman skills. I recalled the times he took me to the steel plant where he worked and protected me from the heat of the burning furnace. I thanked him for his financial provision for my family and me.

A few weeks before he died, my dad and I talked about the letter. I told him I loved him, forgave him and was grateful that he had been in my life. The peace of God passed all understanding in a way that only the Lord can do, and when my father died, we were both at peace with the past.