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He was a pest.

By he, I'm talking about my middle-school archnemesis. I don't apologise for calling this kid a pest or an annoyance because he was, and he knew it, and he was proud of it. I cannot tell you how much this kid annoyed me. For one thing, he wasn't a kid in the sense that he was younger than I was. In fact, he might have been older than I was. Still, he was incredibly immature to the degree that to this day, I still call him a kid.

Fast forward about seven or eight years. Here I am a senior in college. I've progressed in life. I'm up at a prestigious linguistic school. To pass the time, we will all occasionally go to a “restaurant” across the river in Minnesota. The greatest conversations that I have ever have have been coming back from the Blue Moose in East Grand Forks, Minnesota.

Tonight was such an evening. Coming back, we got on the topic of Honduran food because there's this really great Honduran restaurant in Siloam Springs. Someone asked me what Honduran food was. I responded that it was the same as Mexican food… or Colombian food or Cuban food or any sort of food “south of here”. Well, we happen to be pretty far north already just as far as the United States is concerned, so the phrase “south of here” could mean a whole bunch of things. One of our group happened to note that even though there was a lot of stuff to the south, there was still a lot of stuff to the north as well: Canada, Alaska, Siberia… As soon as he said Siberia, I had to point out that Siberia isn't technically to the north. You see, there is a point where you can go so far north that you can't go north anymore. Likewise, a similar situation exists with the south. In the Bible, God talks about how He separates our sins as far as the east is from the west.¹ I noticed that it was important that He didn't separate our sins as far as the north is from the south. Had He have said that instead of east from west, than there would have been a finite distance that our sins would have been separated from us.² However, a person cannot measure the distance from the east to the west. If you start walking east, you will never reach a point where you can't go more east. The same is true for the west.

With that said, another topic came up. This time, it was from the New Testament. It's significant that God would talk in infinite terms like that. However, there's an instance where He doesn't. In the New Testament, he talks of forgiving your neighbour 490 times.³ Obviously, that passage isn't to be taken literally, but it's implied to mean that we should never stop forgiving our brother.

Being the schmuck that I am, I can remember a time when I actually counted to 490 whenever this kid got under my skin which he did on purpose. I remember dreaming about what I was going to do to him once I reached that far off number of 490. The most that my imagination would conjure was to punch him in the head. I was a small guy myself, and this guy was one of the few who was smaller than I was, so I could manage it.⁴

With my self-reflective personality, I can say with no doubt that I was a schmuck. I mean, think about it: I was keeping track of the number of times that I had to forgive someone so that there would finally come a time when I could extract revenge. Seriously, how is that at all keeping with the principle of the rule?

I've come to the conclusion that rules are evil. It's guidelines that we need to keep in mind. Sure, I probably could have counted to 490 and been perfectly legit, but how would that have fit in with the theme of unconditional forgiveness?

I've probably committed more than 490 transgressions in my lifetime. Actually, I'd bet dimes to dollars that I have. I certainly don't want to be accountable for those, but how can I hope to not be if hold people accountable for their sins after the first 490?

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1. Psalms 103:12
2. 20,000 kilometres exactly
3. In my school that fanatically used the King James Version, they taught that it was seventy times seven. In the New International Version, it says seventy-seven times. Regardless, the passage is not meant to be taken literally, but to be taken figuratively. If that is the case, then it really doesn't matter if we're talking seventy-seven times or seventy times seven, does it? (Matthew 18:21-22)
4. I never had to because my brother was bigger than the both of us combined, and we were both afraid of him, but, in the end, he was on my side.