Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.

You have now experienced Barbara’s gifts as storyteller as you listened to the story of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Day. Having enjoyed the story, we will harvest the learnings from it. Here are five quotes from Barbara that will guide us in appreciating her reasons for telling this particular story:

·       The thing we are focused on when we have been injured gives the perpetrator more power than he or she really has. When we turn and face the situation more accurately, he or she shrinks to a normal human size.

·       If the perpetrator does the deed and you hold on to the deed, you’ve helped the perpetrator continue the deed; you’ve become a coconspirator with your own aggressor, not in a matter of guilt—the guilt is still theirs—but in the effect. There is a perverse identity between perpetrator and victim.

·       We can define ourselves as “the ones against so-and-so”; as the ones that must disagree with our enemy. Politics is often like that: “Well, I’m against whatever he’s for.” It becomes a substitute for thinking. We need to define ourselves as ourselves and not allow our enemy to define us.

·       Forgiveness is not this “wonderful thing” I’m going to do to welcome the perpetrator back into my world. Forgiveness is almost an act of self-love. It is a gift to myself. It is primarily for me that I need to forgive. Do you want freedom enough to turn your focus from the one who has hurt you to you, yourself, so that you alone can take the action you need to get out of jail—a jail the perpetrator may have built for you, but a jail whose door you continue to keep locked?

What insights will you take from the story of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Day and from Barbara’s reflection about those two people and the choices they made?

When have you found yourself in the kind of relational jail that Barbara describes in the story and in her reflection? If you are still in one of those situations where you have given the perpetrator more power than is good for either of you, what options do you have to move on?

What options did the congregation of Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Day have other than building their own congregational life around the stubborn willfulness of these two “grand dames” of the congregation