God does not have to find me blameless before He can love me

I once asked my mother if people in Britain during the war heard about the concentration camps and the genocide the Nazis perpetrated.

"Yes" she said, "but we thought it was just propaganda invented by our own government."

Not every German was a Nazi, or committed atrocities even if we have to admit some were good at looking the other way. So if it was hard for the British during the Second World War, to imagine that these horrors really were happening, how much harder for the German people? Who is willing to accept that their countrymen, their husbands, their sons or brothers at the front are perpetrating acts that are the stuff of nightmares until confronted with hard, -almost unbearable- evidence?

And just as the whole guilt issue for Germany was far more subtle and intricate than their one-sided Post-War image, -so also with Serbia, in fact probably even more so. Without incontravertable evidence, why should any Serb assume at the outset that their countrymen have massacred civilians? This of course will be compounded by the one-sidedness of Western European news media (-obvious to a Serb, but not to an outsider-).

So what is the reality?

Reality is the way God sees things: the background causes, the individual decisions, the deliberately caused, and the unintentionally caused evils, the manipulation, the complicity and the innocence; -All!

So how does God distribute the blame?

-Justly: to each according to his own works!

I am responsible for what I perpetrate, what I condone, what I deliberately ignore and for my own wrong attitudes. The guilt is mine, whatever the circumstances giving rise to it. The wrongdoing of others does not absolve me, whatever the provocation! They will have to face what they have done, I will have to face what I have done! In this sense "each must bear their own burden".

But the good news is this: God does not love me because He finds me blameless; He Loves me even though I am not! As long as I do not hide from my complicity, God is prepared do have dealings with me, and He himself has paid the price for my wrongdoing.

There is a condition that goes with this: I cannot expect Him to forgive me, unless I accept that He will forgive others, and except I am willing to do likewise.

That is not the same as denying, ignoring, condoning or underplaying the seriousness of what may have been done against me, or pretending the pain I may have suffered was not as bad as it was, or has magically disappeared. Nor does it mean that crimes should go unpunished. Forgiveness means to be willing want God to treat my enemies with the same generosity He has treated me with, and to be prepared myself to be as generous.