Put Down the Rope
Most of us are familiar with a bell tower. In order to ring the bell, a rope has to be pulled. For the bell to stop ringing, we must let go of the rope.
Corrie ten Boon, best known for hiding Jews during the Holocaust, was later captured and sentenced to hard labor in various concentration camps. She alone, from her family, survied to tell her story. Time and again she was confronted with her need to forgive those who had so brutually tortured her and her family.
Years later, after hearing a sermon on forgiveness, she often used the imagery of a bell in the tower to recount her own struggle with "letting go."
“'Up in that church tower,' [the pastor] said, nodding out the window, 'is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops.'
“I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive someone, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.” — Corrie Ten Boom, Guideposts Classics, November 1972)
When we choose to forgive, it means we're finally willing to let go of the rope. The ringing may continue, but over the course of time, it will eventually stop, as long as we make the choice to not pick up the rope again.
That said, what area(s) in your life are bringing you to the verge of exhaustion from continuing to ring the bell?
In what situations is God asking you to put down the rope? When are you tempted to pick up the rope again?
As you face your own battle with forgiveness, ask the Lord, as the Apostles did, to increase your faith!
"So watch yourselves. “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them. The apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith!'” (Luke 17:3-4, NIV).
"Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you" (Colossians 3:13, NIV).
Look What You Made Me Do
It’s been three long, silent, years, but Taylor Swift is back with new music, and apparently a new approach to career and conflict.
In the opening weekend, the first single from her new album Reputation, was downloaded over 184,000 times on iTunes. The song set a new global first-day record on Spotify with over 8 million streams. And that was all before the music video debuted at the MTV Video Music Awards.
The video was a sensation. According to YouTube, “Look What You Made Me Do” was played more than 43.2 million times in the first 24 hours, the largest one-day sum for any video. It was viewed some 30,000 times every minute.
In the song, Swift seems to be punching back at some, or perhaps all, of her combatants.
The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama
But not for me, not for me, all I think about is karma
And then the world moves on, but one thing’s for sure
Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yoursBut I got smarter, I got harder in the nick of time
Honey, I rose up from the dead, I do it all the time
I’ve got a list of names and yours is in red, underlined
Millions have now mused about who is the “you” in Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” Who forced her hand, who ignited such vengeful energy, who gave birth to such a dark persona? A better way to ask the question, a more honest approach, is to ask, who has become an authority over her emotions?
In moments of clarity, moments free of the haze of conflict, we know that, when it comes to areas of personal choice, no one makes us do anything. We alone are responsible for our actions and the accompanying consequences.
Retaliation, retribution, and revenge are the tones which pour out of this new emanation of Taylor Swift. Emotions which seem to gush out involuntarily. In Taylor’s view, she is not really responsible for what happens next. She is the agent of anger, but not the cause. She is simply reacting to the actions of others, a fact which she repeats 36 times in her four-minute declaration of defiance: “Look what you made me do. Look what you made me do.”
Bitterness is a chain of bondage that essentially makes us a slave to the actions of others. Perhaps this is why Solomon taught his son: “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Proverbs 19:11).
Near the end of the video, Swift stands victorious over that heap of previous personas. One of these choreographed characters had taken a different approach to conflict during Swift’s last album, 1989. It was a much more liberating approach. She’s the one who sang:
I never miss a beat, I’m lightning on my feet
And that’s what they don’t see, that’s what they don’t see
I’m dancing on my own, I make the moves up as I go
And that’s what they don’t know, that’s what they don’t knowBut I keep cruising
Can’t stop, won’t stop grooving
It’s like I got this music in my mind
Saying it’s gonna be alrightCause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it offHeartbreakers gonna break, break, break, break, break
And the fakers gonna fake, fake, fake, fake, fake
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off
Some people don’t have our best interest in mind. They will inevitably mistreat us, misuse us, and malign us. We can’t avoid them. We can’t evade the pain. But we can choose who has authority over us. We can’t control them, but we can control us.
Don’t let them make you do anything. Shake it off! Let them do what they do. Let them say what they say. You live free! You do you!
The Cost to Kill
Many have undertaken to calculate the cost to governments and/or tax payers to kill a single enemy combatant. For instance, it’s been suggest that it might have cost less than $1 to kill an enemy soldier in the time of Caesar, possibly as much as $2000 during the Napoleonic wars, nearly $20,000 during the First World War, and double that by the Second World War. By the time of the Vietnam War, the US had spent about $168 billion (equivalent to nearly $1 trillion today!) on the war effort, resulting in a “kill cost” of approximately $170,000 per downed enemy.
In contemporary terms, it’s hard to calculate the cost to kill, since the US government will not fully divulge the true cost of our “modern” and highly technologically driven conflicts in the Middle East and our war on Terrorism. It has been suggested, however, that it might cost as much as $50 million per enemy combatant vanquished.
As high as the cost to kill an ememy might be, it will never be as high as the cost that God was willing to pay to save those who, through disobedience, had become His enemies. That's because every single enemy combatant that God has redeemed cost Him the life of the Son of God.
"But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).