The Tough Love Of Forgiveness

Forgiveness. It's a word that has pushed, pulled, and messed with my heart, mind, and soul over the last 5 years. On one hand, it's pretty simple, black and white: Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. We should and need to forgive others. Period. But as is usually the case in life, it rarely works out to be that cut and dry.

Hence, it's complex and messy. Pain. Woundedness. Pride. Sin. They all get in the way of us dealing with forgiving. As people who need to forgive and the people who need to be forgiven, we live intertwined lives that zig and zag, criss and cross, and push and pull so that waters we enter are pretty muddy. Thus we live lives in the gray doubting whether we should do the hard and simple work of forgiving others.

The reason I share this is because I really need to come to some resolution with the people and the issues that need time, prayer, and forgiveness. God has been pricking my heart and whispering in my ear for sometime to deal with this stuff. It's been a slow cook area of my life.

Therefore, when I found this blog post entitled "When You Forgive...", I found it to be beautiful, honest, and some of my very thoughts exactly. So I share it with you. Maybe you are dealing with a deep wound in your life caused by someone close whom you trusted and loved. Like my relationships, they are most likely in desperate need to experience the deep, healing, and liberating power of forgiveness. Here is the opening paragraph and another that resonated with me.

I remember when my parents got divorced, people used to tell me, "Time will heal your pain." I hated that rhetoric. Why should my dad and his new wife get away with wrecking our family by virtue of time's ability to heal, to make us forget, to help us move on? So I vowed that time would not heal, that I would not forget, that, in fact, the pain would last.

and

It would have been incredibly helpful, in looking back, if someone had simply mentioned that Jesus died not just for my sins (sins I couldn't see, identify or feel), but that he died for the sins against - for those sins committed against victims. It would have been even more helpful if I hadn't been admonished to forgive my parents, but had rather been told how important my pain was to God, how proud God was of me for caring that much about truth, justice and suffering... and had then shown me a way to use that pain to create a more just and compassionate world (not just a tiny, in-grown sense of personal revenge-as-justice that I had adopted).

(bu to Jesus Creed)