Getting to a Point Where She Could Forgive

A woman well-known in Korean society writes in Bible and Life of an experience she had recently on meeting the person who had been her supervisor in the tax office where she worked after high school. As soon as he saw her, he turned to those who with him and said, so all could hear: "You all know who this woman is. I helped make her what she is."

The writer reminisces on the short time she worked in the tax office and her boss, who had little authority but wielded it with her harshly and whenever he desired.  She flunked the exam for college, and besides the tax office job had an evening job at a tea room as a classical music disk jockey. She would leave work at the tax office and go on to her disk jockey job and often, because of the importunate requests at the tax office, would be late. Her boss at the tax office had ridiculed her for thinking that she, a high school graduate, knew anything about classical music. And she would have to be always ready to prepare the morning coffee, and the way he would get her attention was by a 'Ya'.

Although it was her boss's superior who hired the three girls in the office, he spoke as if he was the one responsible for her success, which annoyed her greatly. Even after she left the job, whenever she thought of him she would get angry, and now he had the gall to say he made her what she had become.

In the brief meeting with him, he said he knew she would make something of herself and recalled  that he urged her to use the  money she earned to go on to college. She found his words self-serving and didn't want to hear any more. His hand shake was as if they were old friends; this added to the annoyance and she found a way to excuse herself and left.

When she reached home, she went to her diary and looked over some of the entries to recall more clearly those days at the tax office. One of the girls working with her quit because of his treatment. She recorded that she was also thinking of quitting but in another entry, she wrote that all these trials would make her stronger.

There was another entry about a boy she met, at a tea room, that she grew to know well and was even invited to his home to meet his mother. When the mother asked her what university she attended and she answered that she was not attending any, the mother's face showed her disappointment. Since the son was a student at an elite university and in the law department, she easily understood the feelings of the mother: a tea room disk jockey interested in her son must have been 'a punch in the stomach.'

However, on more reflection, she analyzed the Korean word for forgiveness and the English word to forgive. In English, it is made up of the word for and give. It is to give completely. It is not something that is 'earned' by what is done by the one who is forgiven but something you give, regardless of what is done or not done; the one who can give is the one who forgives.

These two people--her former supervisor in the tax office and the mother of the boy who invited her to his home--didn't do anything to destroy her future or anything that made it hard for her to forgive; she knew that.  They did something that we all have experienced, and she considered it 'no big deal.'  They helped her, she said, to take the ordinary  slings and arrows that come our way in stride, and made her stronger because of  them. "I have no reason to hate them but to thank them for what they have done for me," was how she summed up the situation. So the next morning  she took out the card that her old boss had given her when they parted recently, and sent him a text message thanking him for what he had done for her. And, she said, she meant it.