True Stories

Nancy sent me a three-page letter describing how her marriage to Martin came to an end. He-did-this-I-did-that, etc. etc. It's the usual sort of sad tale of the destruction of a relationship through nobody acting wilfully or carelessly, but gradually drawing away and damaging each other until the trust is impossible to repair. 

I wondered what to say. The catalogue of mutual disappointments doesn't actually help me: there is a truth here I can't really access. To her credit Nancy doesn't say it was all Martin's fault, but she clearly feels she has done what she must do, what her heart compels her to do, even while she hates herself for doing it. Perhaps she hopes that by admitting to guilt I will tell her it's all OK.

I remember how Jesus could meet someone and see the thing they needed to hear, could sum up who they were in a single sentence, or even a story which bore only an oblique, but nevertheless as it turned out exact, relationship to what they were on about. Those three pages of events and reactions are not, really, the story of what happened to Nancy and Martin: they are not the single line that God would say, and I can't deduce from them his perfect, merciful summary of the sad fourteen months they describe. So I merely say that that is what he could do, and because he could, because he understands who Nancy and Martin are better than they do themselves - let alone each other - that is why he is able to forgive. That's where forgiveness comes from.