Proverbs from Produce

Thirteen years ago, I was graduating high school, discovering conditioner, and working as a waitress at the Pizza Hut down the street from my house.  Don't be too jealous.  One day, I waited on a couple and their sweet little boy.  The kid, like most kids his age, was really excited to show off all the random stuff he had hauled into the restaurant with him.  He pulled out a stack of 3-D Veggie Tales collectable message cards and read them to me slowly while his parents smiled apologetically.  When he finished, he held out one of his cards and said, "Here.  You can have this one."  I looked at his parents, not really sure if I should take it or not, but they didn't seem to care one way or the other so I thanked my tiny dark-haired customer and tucked the card into the center pocket of my little black apron.  The $2.00 his parents left me was most certainly gone by the end of the week, but that little Veggie Tales card has survived one cat, two kids, five jobs, six years of college, and like a dozen moves.  I don't keep it up on display or anything, but I always know where it is and I recite its message whenever I'm feeling particularly angry with someone: We need to forgive others because God always forgives us.

This little mantra works wonders.  I think I'm almost overly forgiving sometimes.  I guess it's better than walking around stewing in a venomous hatred, right?  I'm a pretty happy person.

Recent events have caused me to call on the Guidance of the Gourds increasingly frequently, however. I'm not going to publicly bash the person who is causing me all of this grief, and I'm not going to elaborate on the details...mostly because I'm not a sixteen-year-old girl, and partially because I can't allow myself to be too wicked...but I *will* rant a little about how much it sucks to be called on to forgive the same person for the same poor decisions week after week, month after month, year after year.

What I really want to know is where to draw the line between being forgiving and blatant idiocy.  Do you continue to forgive a person for repeat transgressions, or does there come a time when you can say "enough is enough"?  In my opinion, being forgiven all the time for the same thing isn't much motivation to modify a person's behavior.  No long-term repercussions?  No serious consequences?  No lessons learned whatsoever.

Sometimes it seems like "forgiving" becomes synonymous "enabling".  When I see these cyclic trends developing, I often think I should stop relying on vegetables for advice and rely a little more on my own intuition.  How many forgiving victims of domestic violence go crawling back to the person who abuses them?  How many trashy, ungrateful pricks take advantage of the forgiving, hard-working person who lends them money time and time again without ever being paid back?  How many forgiving people are hurt emotionally, physically, and financially every day by those who they have forgiven a few too many times?  Do they ever recoup their losses?  Do they ever rid themselves of the disease?

I'd like to think there's a middle ground.  I'd like to think you can forgive someone for their bad choices without forgetting the ways that those choices personally affected you.  I know they say "forgive and forget" but I think that if we remembered a little bit more, we could learn from the past and ensure that if it repeats itself, we can mitigate our damages.  I have two amazing kids to look out for.  They have stability in the life that I've worked so hard to give them, and I never want to sacrifice that just to be the good guy - I think all I'm really being is an accommodating pushover.

It's easy to remember all the ways I've been screwed and taken advantage of.  It's equally easy for me to take action so that it doesn't happen again.  It's that darn forgiveness that's hard to dole out, especially when it seems so undeserved!  Thanks to that darling little kid in the booth at A3 though, I have a Veggie Tales 3-D Pass It On Message Card (#2) - something so simple and so true that reminds me who I am and the kind of person I want my children to be.