At first I had included this at the end of my prior post, but I felt like it should be separate. It’s difficult to “forget what is behind” when the things “behind” are lists of good things we’ve been involved in or done. It’s also hard, when we keep such lists, to forgot our inevitable failures. Sometimes there are failures that genuinely are “my fault.” I sinned. I didn’t step up to the plate. I lost it. Sometimes there are “failures” that are simply things that happened.
This week I received from one of my former law partners a copy of a judicial opinion concerning some people I had represented years ago in a bitter business dispute. The opinion was handed down in a recent case that was in some ways a continuation of the case I had handled four years ago. It’s fair to say that the nastiness and difficulty of that earlier case put me “over the edge” and led to some major changes in my life, including resigning my prestigious law partnership to take a teaching job. I’m very, very glad those changes happened — I love what I do now more than any other work I’ve done in my career — but for the past few years I’ve carried the baggage of that case. Could I have done something differently? Couldn’t I have resolved or won the case before it became such a problem?
Well, maybe. If you’re like me, you can pick apart anything you’ve done and find lots of flaws. But in this instance, it really wasn’t me. The judge in the opinion that my former partner sent me had some extraordinarly harsh words for the litigants’ conduct over the past five or six years. It was them all along. There’s nothing I could have done to salvage the disaster they had made for themselves.
Reading this judicial opinion, hearing this Judge criticize these individuals so harshly for their conduct for which they alone are responsible, felt like an enormous weight lifting from my soul. I think, I hope, I can now be free of that part of my past, and “press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” (Phil. 3:12.)