They Say a Locked Door Is Unforgiving

She changed the lock on a Thursday and she has not slept properly since Sunday, which is when the first person said it to her.

The change itself took a locksmith forty minutes and cost less than she expected. It was not dramatic. There was no scene, nobody was told, and the person it concerns has not yet found out and may not for weeks.

Then on Sunday somebody she loves, who does not know the half of it, said the sentence. And on Tuesday a second person said almost exactly the same thing in different words.

A locked door is not what forgiveness looks like.

She did not argue with either of them. She said something about the old lock being stiff, which was also true, and she came home and sat in the car.

And the thing that has been happening since is not doubt about the lock. She is entirely clear about the lock. It is that she has started, at about three in the morning, to run an examination of her own heart to see whether she has in fact forgiven, and she cannot find a reliable answer, and it is eating her.

The necessary thing, first and plainly

Before anything else on this page.

Nothing here asks you to stay anywhere unsafe or to make peace with harm. There is no verse in Scripture and no line in this article that requires anybody to hand herself over to be hurt, and nothing on this page will ever tell you to open a door.

If you are in danger, get safe first. Tell one real person who can actually do something: the police, a domestic abuse service where you live, a doctor, a lawyer, somebody at a church who has actual training. Being safe is not a failure of peace. It is not a failure of forgiveness. It has never once been either of those.

You are not required to absorb this, and the lock does not need defending to anybody. Nobody is being kind to you here. Psalm 11:5 says the Lord's soul hates the one who loves violence, which is God's own stated position, and the Holy Spirit is the one raising it now to settle a woman at three in the morning rather than to add to the examination.

Forgiveness and access are two different things

Here is the distinction those two people have collapsed, almost certainly without meaning to, and it is the whole of the trouble.

Forgiveness is something that happens inside a person. It is a release of a debt, a refusal to keep collecting, a decision not to spend the rest of your life prosecuting somebody in your own head.

Access is a key. It is a physical arrangement about who can come into a building.

Those are not the same thing and Scripture never treats them as the same thing. There is no verse anywhere in the book where a person is required to hand over a key as evidence of a released debt.

You are able to have forgiven somebody entirely and still hold the key, and no page in the written word puts those in conflict. Scripture puts prudence in the book as its own category in Proverbs 27:12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates two things that have been welded together by two people who love you and do not know the half of it.

What the written word calls the lock

Look at the word Scripture actually uses for what you did on Thursday.

A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.Proverbs 27:12

Prudent. Not fearful, not bitter, not unforgiving. Prudent, which is a word of commendation in the wisdom literature, and the alternative offered in the verse is not forgiveness, it is being simple and getting hurt.

Foreseeth the evil and hideth himself. That is a lock, described approvingly, in the book those two people were quoting the spirit of at you.

You have done the thing Scripture calls wise, and it has a name in the book and the name is not coldness. Proverbs 27:12 puts hiding yourself on the commended side of the verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a car outside a church on a Sunday.