True Justice Comes from God

I should keep a tally of all the times I read the Bible and through it God is basically saying, “why don’t you just listen to me and do this?” I’m pretty sure it would work out to God: 1,000,000 and me: 0. That’s just how life is. I’m continuing through the New Testament, and just finished 1 John today. Due to all the stress I’m going through and the extreme workload Holy Cross gives its students, I haven’t had much time to read my Bible or pray. Earlier this week I was reading chapter 4, and verse 20 struck me. John is writing about love (he always does) and in this section he talks about forgiveness. John writes, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” It’s a pretty powerful message, and that is mainly because forgiveness is so hard. I don’t know how many times I’ve written this, I feel like it’s a lot and that I should have learned this by now. I try very hard to let things go and live my life, but it seems to be inevitable that I will fall down and succumb to that anger at things from the past. Then I read words like these, I see how much my ability (or inability) to forgive is costing me a relationship with God, but also a relationship with those around me. Forgiveness is tough, mainly because we don’t want to let things go. We reason that if we let things slide then somehow an injustice is done to us. I’m not the vengeful type, but I’m not the forgiving type either, at least not as forgiving as I should be. I pray that God will open my heart to let go of things from the past, and show all of us what it means to truly love those around me. Sure bad things happen and people seem to get away with it, but is it really our job to judge them? The answer is no what our job is, is to move on past those things and turn to God to fill us up. Holding things against people may provide a sense of fairness, but true justice comes from God.