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This may have to do with me becoming a violence prevention course facilitator in Fraser Health or perhaps it is just a product of me being a man surrounded by women, but out of all the roles that I have played throughout my life, the most entertaining has been mediator between women and nature. Nature, as you may know, can be violent and it is important to protect our women and children.

I have noticed this theme especially in the realm of spiders throughout my life, and more recently at work it has been stinkbugs. There is one particular co-worker who has a window that for some reason attracts stinkbugs. They will fly in the window and end up in her workspace. In restrained and polite terror, she comes to my office to ask me to take care of the stinkbugs that occasionally come in. She has a particular jar that she has me trap the stinkbug under. I then slip a piece of paper under the jar and free the stinkbug outside.

Even more recently, I went to a farm with my family that had animals that we could pet and hang out with in a pen. There was a donkey, a pony, goats, sheep, and one particularly offensive creature: the cobra chicken, also known as the goose. After this particular cobra chicken had started hissing and posturing at one of the ladies in our party who has a history of cobra chicken trauma, the farmer let us know that when they got this cobra chicken it was pretty good with people, but over time had gotten more protective of its young. This cobra chicken even started pecking at feet and was generally nasty. The strategy that we were taught by the farmer was to not try to scare the goose away, but to pretend that we were going to hug the cobra chicken. I believe we were supposed to go right towards the cobra chicken with open arms so that the goose would naturally go another way. After I tried this to no effect, the farmer suggested I give the cobra chicken a quick tap with my shoe, so I did. I gladly accepted my responsibility again as mediator between women and nature.

These examples are of course from a narrow set of my experiences. Women like my wife and my mother in law are very often braver than myself when it comes to taking care of mice for instance.

More seriously, when it comes to everyday experiences of harm from others, whether it is physical violence or harmful words, we are all invited to be presences that stand up to violence in ways that heal and not harm.

I’ve finally finished reading Tim Keller’s Forgive: How Can I and Why Should I and unlike other media I have mentioned on my blog, I can without any caveats highly recommend it to any adult. I recommend it to Christians because it has so many well thought through discussions of Scripture’s take on forgiveness. I can recommend to any non-Christian, religious or not, because it respectfully dialogues with other perspectives on the issue. I recommend it for those who have experienced violence and are working through what has been done to them and want to know more of God’s wisdom on the issue. I recommend for those who have been rejected or snubbed and hurt in nonviolent ways and want to move through their hurt in a healing way.

I was surprised by Forgive because of its attention to language used in forgiveness interactions and apologies. While I was not surprised to read Keller getting into deep discussions of God’s grace to us through Jesus’ work on the cross, I was surprised reading as Keller acknowledged many different possible experiences in the act of forgiveness. It is important to talk about forgiveness as an act and not a feeling because God wants us to seek reconciliation where possible. As surely as God has reconciled us to him through Jesus, so we too can be reconciled to each other through the strength and humility that he gives to us as forgiven sinners.

If you want to know more about what I think about forgiveness, please ask me! I am working through Keller’s concepts myself, but if you do read, I would recommend 10/10.

Nowhere in Forgive Keller recommended forgiving Cobra Chickens for the trauma they have put you through, so if God does call you to forgive Cobra Chickens, then I would very much like to hear your experience, but it’s ok if you still feel terror and resentment walking past a cobra chicken.