Have you ever been hurt by someone?  What a stupid question, of course you have.  Here’s a better question then.

Have you ever been badly hurt by someone and that hurt is something you carry around with you, always there, weighing you down and stopping you from living life to the full?

Photo by RupertUK

If so, then you, (along with the rest of us mere mortals), need to somehow forgive that other person.

Why Forgive

I’m not sure where I saw the saying but “Not forgiving is like drinking poison in the hope that it will kill the other person”.

Quite simply holding onto unforgiveness with the hatred involved and often the need for revenge makes for a very unhappy life.  It is especially destructive on your other relationships and it negatively affects almost every area of your life.

As I write this I note that Leo over at Zen Habits has just posted “How to let go and forgive” and what he says is worth a look too.

When I posted about baggage that clutters our mind and holds us back from being everything we could be, Becki commented that she was looking forward to the rest of the series and I apologise for the delay in getting this completed.  Part two was about forgiving yourself and this is the third and final post of the series.

I’m not going to try and tell you how to forgive.  I don’t think forgiveness is as easy as a 1,2,3 step by step process that you follow and all of a sudden, all is well.  It was Elizabeth O’Connor who said…

Forgiveness is a whole lot harder than any sermon makes it out to be.

And I have to agree.  I thinks its a long term process.  C.S. Lewis was surprised by it…

Last week in prayer, I discovered, or at least I think I did, that I suddenly was able to forgive someone that I had been trying to forgive for over thirty years.

So I’m not going to tell you how, but I am going to tell you two things.  What forgiveness isn’t and what forgiveness is.  Hopefully that will hep you as you work your way through it.

Forgiveness isn’t

 

Demanding a Person Changes

You can’t demand a person changes before you’ll forgive them.  Some people will change but many won’t.

Don’t forget that if you won’t forgive because someone won’t change, it’s not a case of punishing them, it you punishing yourself instead.

Forgetting

Forgive and forget, we hear that a lot don’t we.  But you don’t have to forget to forgive.  In fact there’s many instances where forgetting would be wrong.

Pretending it Doesn’t Matter

Pretending it doesn’t matter won’t work either.  All you’ll end up doing is pushing the hurt deeper and deeper within you.  Then either you’ll explode in rage at some point when the pressure gets too much, (normally at someone close to you for some insignificant little thing), or you stop yourself from being really able to feel.

If you can’t feel anymore, then you can’t love or feel love.  And if you can’t love or feel love then you’re restricting your life to existence, not life.

Thinking Time Will Heal

Time will help.  Time will dull the pain.  But time alone will not heal.

Forgiveness is

 

Facing the Wrong

You need first of all to admit that you have been wronged.

This sounds strange, but many people go through life convincing themselves that the bad that happened to them was, in some way, their fault.  Quite simply, this is not the case.  Even if the wrong done to you was over zealous punishment for something you did do, the hurt will have come from the over zealousness, not from the fair justice.

Recognising the Emotions

Let yourself own the feelings that are inside you.  But not just recognise them, maybe for the first time in your life, allow yourself to accept that those feelings are legitimate.

Hurts done to you do invoke feelings, of course they do.  So let yourself feel.

A Choice

Then you need to understand that forgiveness is a choice, not a feeling.  You can still legitimately have thos feelings but if you wait until you “feel” like forgiving, it may never happen and you could be stuck, right where you are, for the rest of your life.

Make a conscious choice to forgive the other person, even if you don’t feel like it.

Releasing the Person

In my opinion you need to then release the person to God.  In doing so, you may well find it in yourself to actually love them.

If you are wondering about this aspect then I strongly recommend Corrie Ten Boom’s book “The Hiding Place”.  Corrie was a Dutch lady whose family helped hide Jews during WWII.  Much of her family died at the hands of the Nazi’s and she also spent time in their concentration camps.

Near the end of the book she tells about coming face to face with one of the guards many years later.  She was on a speaking tour, talking on forgiveness.  Yet her honest recollection of how hard it was to even shake the man’s hand will bring tears to your eyes.  But in that passage she speaks of God’s love allowing her to forgive.

Are you struggling with forgiveness

If you are, you’re not alone.  But I pray that you will seek a way forward, because in forgiveness you will find your way to a richer life, free from the shackles of the past.

God bless

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