No Record of Wrong
By Glenna Marshall
I have kept a journal since I was seven years old. When my parents handed me that first lock-and-key diary, I felt like an unknown world had opened to me. I could write anything I wanted in whatever manner I wanted, and no one would know but me. As I grew, so did the pile of hidden journals. I’m forty now, and I’d say my journal stack is roughly thirty books deep. I’ve found that chronicling my life (small and inconsequential though it may be) gives me a tangible way to remember the things I really don’t want to forget. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that it also gives me a way to remember some things I need to forget.
During one particularly rough year of church ministry long ago, I retreated to my journal daily—sometimes multiple times a day—to unburden my heart. I was lonely as the pastor’s wife, and I wasn’t sure who was “safe” in my church at the time. So, my poor journal bore the brunt of my despair and tears. Indeed, many pages from that year are splotched with tear drops. You can see where the ink has run.
I wrote down every hurtful criticism, every backstabbing betrayal, every heated conversation. I wrote with my pen pressed hard into the paper, carving the names of the instigators of my pain next to their words. The pages are littered with full dialogues, complete with quotation marks, perceived tone, and my inability to respond out loud without recrimination. In some ways, it was cathartic. But in another way, it removed the possibility of my ever forgetting who hurt me and how they did it.
Years later, after the Lord brought some healing and restoration into our church and my heart, I flipped through my journal from that hard year. I could feel the emotions rising inside. Old wounds reopened and festered with unforgiveness. I relived some of those conversations, imagining myself saying now what I couldn’t say then. I felt a flicker of bitterness as I resurrected old hurts and gave myself to old anger. I closed the journal with a snap and placed it back on the shelf. I didn’t want to burn the whole book because most of the time journaling helps me see how God faithfully carried me through hard times. I can see the ways He worked in my heart, bringing sin to the surface and using life circumstances to sand down my rough edges. My journals are a record of the ongoing sanctification God is doing in my life. What should I do with all this record-keeping, though, if it induces me to resurrect anger towards my church?
The Love Chapter is For the Church
How many weddings have you been to where 1 Corinthians 13 is read? I can’t keep count, to be honest. It’s a beautiful chapter about sacrificial love, and I understand the sentiment behind reading it during a wedding service. What is a faithful marriage without sacrificial love, after all? Yet, as I’ve been deep in study of 1 Corinthians this year with my church study group, there’s no missing that the “Love Chapter” we’re all so familiar with isn’t aimed at marriage, specifically. Though we can and should apply the principles of 1 Corinthians 13 to marriage, husbands and wives aren’t addressed in relation to their covenant relationship. No, it’s a different kind of covenant relationship addressed in 1 Corinthians 13. Paul wrote this chapter as he did the rest of the book—to the Christians in the church at Corinth. This local church had its problems, and Paul lovingly (and a little ruthlessly) answered their questions and rebuked their sometimes shocking behavior. Once he addressed the issues of sexual sin, idolatry, and temptation, he moved to instructions for corporate worship. He wrote about spiritual gifts and their place in church services, and he explained how every person is needed in the body of Christ. No matter your gift, you are needed and loved. And there, wedged between chapter 12 on spiritual gifts and chapter 14 on the motives behind the use of gifts is chapter 13. It’s a chapter on love for one another within the body of Christ. It’s a chapter on church love. It’s a chapter that doesn’t allow for resentment or records of wrong.
Paul begins by explaining the hypocrisy of using the noble gift of prophecy or the much-coveted gift of tongues while totally divorced from Christian love. If the purpose of the gifts is edification of the church, how can one truly use the gifts if they don’t love the people of the church? You can’t, Paul explains. You’ll be nothing more than an irritating noise. Heart motive, as we see throughout all of Scripture, matters to God. Paul goes on to describe Christian love in those familiar terms we so often hear at weddings. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor. 13:4-8a).
The Opposite of Love
Love like that sounds…impossible. Or it did when I was transcribing the ways my church hurt me into the pages of my journal. How could I love the church after all the pain and betrayal? Was I even called to love them like that? Paul makes it clear that love, real Christian love, is eternal. In heaven we won’t need spiritual gifts because we’ll be fully alive in the presence of God, complete and lacking nothing. But love will continue past this life into the next. No matter what my situation with the church, I must love her as Jesus loves her. And He really loves her. However, because the Spirit lives in me, I can love the church. Not perfectly, and not all the time. Sin is still a present reality in this life. But, with time and growth and the faithful, sanctifying work of Christ in my life, the love that Paul writes about will grow in my heart as the Spirit keeps His word to make me more like Jesus.
But, practically speaking, how do I strive to obey the Lord in loving the church after being hurt? One of the most convicting phrases in 1 Corinthians 13 is the one regarding resentment in verse 4. Some translations use the phrase: “love keeps no record of wrong.” Either way, it’s clear: resentment keeps a record. That day that I opened my journal and relived the old hurts, I realized that this was the opposite of love. This was record-keeping. This was resentment. This was disobedience. Convicted, I took a black sharpie to my journal and blacked out every single name. While I wanted to remember the hard years and the way the Lord later redeemed them, I didn’t need every detail. Were I to open the journal today, all these years later, I would have trouble remembering who said what. Time and the Lord’s kindness have blurred the edges of my memory. I blacked out the names because love keeps no record of wrongs. Resentment does.
These days, I still journal multiple times a week. I continue to see the Lord’s grace in my life as I work through personal sufferings as well as church-related issues. But, these days, I give my future self the gift of forgetfulness. I leave out names and details that lead to record-keeping. I am choosing, instead, to remember how the Lord has loved me through my church. While there are plenty of tears splotched pages in my journals these days, some of those tears were cried with joy instead of lament. There is room for joy in the pages, and that is what I want to remember.
If you struggle to forget past hurts and betrayals as a ministry wife, I encourage you to meditate on 1 Corinthians 13, praying that the Lord would cultivate the fruit of sacrificial love in your heart towards your church. If you feel that you need to talk through issues of resentment and bitterness with someone, please reach out to us at Practical Shepherding Women for one-on-one mentoring or counseling. Email us at kcarmackps@gmail.com to contact us. Check out our services for more information.
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence: Why God is Always Enough (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World (Crossway, June 2020).