Forgive and Forgive

My deepest apologies for once again letting down the readers for not posting the rest of my Top8’s of 08. Maybe soon, I will get them posted.

Recently several key people in my life and I have been discussing the topic of forgiveness. Each of us has various circumstances in our lives that have brought this idea to the front of our minds. We have talked about how unforgiveness affects both the offended and the offender and discussed what forgiveness truly is.

Before I came into my own (my general term for before I started college and living on my own) I had it in my head that forgiveness included forgiving and forgetting. In my theory, I believed that I should forgive the person who offended me and forget the incident and pain that it brought into my life. I often had false guilt over not being able to forget what had occurred.

A few incidences came into my life that allowed to me try and put this theory into practice. And as you may well expect, the forgetting part was impossible. This caused me to question if I had, in fact, forgiven at all. It was during this process that I began to realize that the forgetting may not actually be a part of forgiveness but just a natural part of the process that happens over time after forgiveness takes place.

All this to say, I am beginning to understand that true forgiveness is forfeiting my right to bring up the situation again in a harmful way. True forgiveness means that I am acknowledging that someone brought hurt into my life, but I am not going to allow this hurt to continue to damage my relationship with that person. We see this being modeled perfectly in Jesus. He is all-knowing and all forgiving so I am not sure if He forgets what I have done to hurt Him (maybe He does, He is God and He could do that if He wants), but He sacrificed His life to remove the guilt of my sin and to show me that He is not going to allow this hurt to affect my relationship with Him. He will still love me just the same as before the hurt happened and is not going to bring up the hurt again (…as far as the east is from the west. Ps103:12.)

To be honest, forgiving is easier for me than accepting forgiveness. It is easier for me to let a hurt go than to humble myself and ask forgiveness of someone else. But this is where we have to allow ourselves to experience grace from each other and from Christ and live a forgiven life.