In all the times I have studied the New Testament either as a seminary student and as a student in a New Testament class at BYU, plus the years I studied and taught seminary and the Gospel Doctrine class in Sunday School, I didn’t really recall the contents of the book of Philemon at all. But in our Come Follow Me study this last week, it was one of Paul’s epistles that was on the docket to get a greater understanding.
It’s the shortest of Paul’s letters, just one page, and it sounds more like a personal letter to Philemon as Paul encourages him to forgive his servant Onesimus who ran away but ultimately was converted to the Church.
As I was studying this little epistle, I thought a lot about forgiveness—seeking forgiveness and forgiving others who have injured us. There are some powerful messages in these few verses in the Pauline epistles.
Then I thought about a book I read recently which one of my flying partners recommended. It was a really good book. The kind we used to read in Book Club that had some meat in the story and some great writing to make it unforgettable. (THOSE have been far and few between since the B.R.O.A.D.S. disbanded when Janean moved to Utah and the rest of us scattered here and there after hanging on for a couple of years following Rosalie’s departure.)
M. L. Stedman wrote “The Light Between Oceans” as a debut novel set in her native Western Australia. Briefly, it is about Tom a World War I soldier who survived the horrible trenches in Western Europe. He enjoys being alone as the lighthouse keeper on a small island at the tip of the continent. Then on one trip back to the mainland, he meets Isabel and eventually brings her back to the island as his wife. Life is solitary and hard. Soon after she has suffered her third miscarriage, a small boat washes up on the shore with a baby who is alive and a man who is dead. Isabel talks her husband into letting them keep the baby, though he is very opposed to it because the baby obviously belongs to someone else. The rest of the book is about the consequences of that choice.
Eventually this couple finds out who the baby belongs to and the circumstances of its being out on the ocean in a boat with her dead father. In flashbacks the reader learns that the father was an Austrian whose own father took the family to Australia when his financial condition was reduced to nothing because of his gambling addiction. The father commits suicide leaving Frans (now Frank) the sole provider. He does very well for himself as a baker, but the townspeople don’t see any difference from him as an Austrian as from a German. He speaks German. To these people he is the embodiment of everything evil about the Great War. He is shunned. He is treated very poorly. He is ridiculed and taunted. But he has chosen to rise above it and treat others better than he has been treated—always a smile and a good word even with their meanness directed to him. That is what attracted his wife to him. His wife, who is the baby’s mother.
One particularly bad day Hannah, the wife and mother of the man and baby in the boat,
"recalled a conversation with her husband Frank. “But how? How can you just get over these things, darling? She had asked him. “You’ve had so much strife but you’re always happy. How do you do it?’
“I choose to,” he said. “I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.”
“But it’s not that easy.”
He smiled that Frank smile. “Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.” He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. “I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No”—his voice became sober—“we always have a choice. All of us.”
Forgiveness is such an important part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The world is permeated with wisdom and stories (both classical and homely) which catalog its importance, not only to the one wronged, but for the one who is doing the “wronging”.
Bottom line...we all need forgiveness. Daily. And we all need to be reminded that we need it. Either through our study of the scriptures, or through the thoughtful creation of a talented writer. There is no end of worthy examples for us to follow, beginning with Jesus Christ.
To err is human; to forgive, divine.
Alexander Pope
NOTE: There is also a movie of the same name which came out in 2016, I think. It follows the story pretty closely, so I thought it was also worthwhile. Actually, I saw the movie first--and then could hardly wait for Amazon Prime to deliver the book two days later. I was not disappointed.
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