DO YOU KNOW THE SWEETNESS OF BEING SLANDERED WHEN YOU ARE UTTERLY INNOCENT?

DO YOU KNOW THE SWEETNESS OF BEING SLANDERED WHEN YOU ARE UTTERLY INNOCENT?

At first it throws you into such anguish that even a week of nonstop toothache cannot compare.

Someone lifts you up... no — Yusuf’s brothers lift him up and throw him into the well, don’t they — just like that: your brothers lift you up, and just when you think, “oh, oh, how lovely,” they hurl you headfirst toward the ground with all their strength.

Until your head hits the ground, you think they are joking.

When you hit, everything goes pitch black before your eyes.

It feels as though your brain has shattered.

Then you realize that they struck you against the ground in anger, with wrath and without mercy.

You have no strength either to cry or to sob.

Then forty days pass. Eighty days.

Then the world brightens before your eyes.

Then you say, “But I was innocent.”

You say, “But I had done nothing to my brothers.”

You say, “My only fault was that I loved them.”

This is the parable of being slandered.

On the day your mind comes back together after the slander, you find the bliss of being slandered.

After all, you are pure in this matter.

So it was slander against you.

So... this looks like a blessed thing. You become drunk on the feeling of being in the right.

You feel yourself to be a confidant of the Lord. For both He and you know that you were slandered. God and you know that you are pure in this matter.

Thanks to the slander that made you God’s confidant, and gratitude to the slanderer.