When you give up vengeance, make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine...Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secure when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction. Vengeance is personal satisfaction. Justice is moral accounting...Human forgiveness does not do away with human justice.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the distinction between vengeance and justice, highlighting the importance of moral accountability over personal gratification.
Lewis B. Smedes illustrates that while vengeance may provide personal satisfaction when someone who has wronged us is punished, it does not equate to true justice. Justice is the objective and fair resolution of wrongdoing, independent of personal emotions, emphasizing that forgiveness does not negate the need for accountability in a moral sense.
In practice
In a speech about reconciliation after conflict, this quote can highlight the importance of justice over petty grievances.
God is the original, master forgiver. Each time we grope our reluctant way through the minor miracle of forgiving, we are imitating his style. I am not at all sure that any of us would have had imagination enough to see the possibilities in this way to heal the wrongs of this life had he not done it first.
Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind...And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again...Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory Forgiving sets you free.
Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.
Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator. Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving is love's power to break nature's rule.
Forgiving does not usually happen at once. It is a process, sometimes a long one, especially when it comes to wounds gouged deep. And we must expect some lapses...some people seem to manage to finish off forgiving in one swoop of the heart. But when they do, you can bet they are forgiving flesh wounds. Deeper cuts take more time and can use a second coat.
When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself.
It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they always purr: "If they would only purr for 'yes,' and mew for 'no,; or any rule of that sort," she had said, "so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can you talk with a person if they always say the same thing?
It is in the turmoil of chaos that we discover what, if anything, we are.
For he who has died has been freed from sin...14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
Liberty, then, is the sovereignty of the individual, and never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time, and property, each living and acting at his own cost.
...I knew he would be dead, because Dally Winston wanted to be dead and he always got what he wanted.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,_x000D_ _x000D_ But bad mortality o'ersways their power,_x000D_ _x000D_ How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,_x000D_ _x000D_ Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
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