As a teen, traveling the 100-mile stretch of road to my dad’s house to spend Christmas was not how I pictured a joyful holiday. I remember feeling angry and sad, wanting life to return to how it was before my parents’ divorce shattered so many things, including Christmas traditions.
My grandmother was visiting for the holidays, and she was quick to recognize my pain—maybe because of her own. My grandfather had passed away a few years earlier, and my grandma was learning to adjust to her own new traditions. She offered me encouragement and we attended church together on Christmas Eve when no one else in the family was going that year. For me, it was in seeing her faith, that I began to move forward in forgiveness.
God places people in our lives to show us the love of Christ, to turn our hearts toward him, to help us practice forgiveness. In the Bible, God told Ananias that he was to go and minister to one of Christianity’s greatest enemies at the time: Saul (who would soon become Paul). Saul had been actively persecuting Christ-followers and Ananias had every reason to be afraid to go anywhere near Saul. Yet Ananias obeyed God and helped Saul who was temporarily blinded. Ananias helped change the trajectory of Paul’s life—and countless others across the generations—as Paul would later become an apostle of Jesus and write a significant portion of the New Testament. God, in his mercy and grace, chose to forgive Paul and send someone to help him heal. Just as God, in his great love, sent Jesus, as our Savior, to forgive and heal us for all-time.