Does forgiving someone mean that someone should not act. or could a person forgive someone or someones and still hit them in the head with a baseball bat?
Bud, I've got the BTDT shirt for that question.
My niece and her kids live with me and my son now, for protection from her abusive, druggie Ex. He doesn't come around here. He knows I'd kill him, and death is the only thing he fears. Her only escape from him was to come live with me. She'd tried getting away from him before, and he followed her everywhere... but here. Here, her and her two little children have lived in peace for over a year, and prospered, and done well.
Why? Because her Ex knows me and knows I wouldn't hesitate to blow his head off.
Not because I hate him. I don't. Got nothing to do with it.
Back in the day, when he was trying to get clean and figure out how to be a man, a husband, and a father, I tried to mentor him a bit. I got to know him. He came from a very bad, very messed up family. He literally did not know HOW to be a good man. I tried to show him. I felt a lot of empathy for him... given what he'd come from, it was a wonder he wasn't WORSE.
We were friends, sort of, for a while.
The call of the drugs was too strong for him, though. He's a weak man, and knows little but drugs, theft, fraud and dependency, and how to abuse those weaker than himself.
He crossed a line (several really) and got served notice: Mama and the babies were coming to stay with Uncle G, and he was barred on risk of imminent death.
Now see, I don't WANT to kill this guy. I know him well. I don't hate him, far from it: I feel great pity for him and great sorrow that he failed to turn his life around. I am great-uncle to his two children. This is not some stranger... this is practically family.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I would indeed kill him if necessary, and he knows it. It would be an act, not of hate or vengeance, but of protection of the innocent.
That's the difference.