Why Forgive When It Feels Like There Is No Point?

Forgiveness.

What a tired word. It lacks energy. It sounds like it has a “hmphh” in it. It lands like a thud.

For Americans, who love everything to be moving forward—new stuff, exciting and heroic stuff—forgiveness sounds about as exciting as going to the library. It feels old. It looks backward. It’s slowing down to fix what’s broken. It feels sticky.

Perhaps forgiveness is something we misjudge because we misunderstand it.

In fact, if we are to recapture the wonder of grace and the beauty of peace-making, we need to recognize there are reasons forgiveness still packs a huge punch. They are as follows.

1. Forgiveness paves the way to better realities.

Forgiveness literally creates new realities. It is, often times, the only bridge forward when all is broken and beyond repair.

My friend Todd Deatherage, a former State Department worker, leads educational trips to Israel and Palestine—a conflict-ridden place in where things seem intractable—to introduce men and women to true peacemakers. Rather than taking sides, they give their entire lives to help both sides win.

For people who have lost family members and friends in the heat of this conflict, this takes a tremendous amount of forgiveness where forgiveness seems impossible.

Forgiveness is the only way to find a win/win when decades of hatred have accumulated. Hatred and violence end when forgiveness cuts the Gordian knot.

Easy? No.

Necessary? Yes.

We don’t always get a clean slate to start with—certainly not in a place like the Middle East—so forgiveness is the healing balm.

By the time most of us reach adulthood (or our 30s and 40s), there will be dozens of relationships we wish we could start anew. We long for fresh starts. We have a choice: we can run from broken relationships. We can think they’re all behind us.

Or, realizing that life is messy and people make mistakes, we can begin to learn the art of starting over through the application of grace.

2. Forgiveness alone allows for transparency and freedom.

There’s something dangerously beautiful about a man or woman who is open and transparent enough to not only own their own faults, but those of others as well. Someone who cares about the flourishing of the community more than his own.

Anyone who is that humble or self-effacing has nothing to hide.

Jesus ended the teaching of the Lord’s Prayer with the words, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Interestingly, he immediately followed it with the commentary, “For if you forgive those who sin against you, your sins will also be forgiven.”

Jesus builds into the heart of his message the idea that the state of our relationship with each other speaks directly to the state of our relationship with God.

Grace and forgiveness free us from the burden of secrecy, the deception of pride and the stench of bitterness. They allow us to be fully human—as God intended—naked in his presence and moldable as clay.

The giving and getting of forgiveness does for us spiritually what breathing oxygen in and out does for us physically.

3. Forgiveness is at the heart of justice.

This might sound crazy to someone who has been the victim of extreme injustice—say losing relatives in the Holocaust or experiencing racial injustice in the Deep South.

At the end of the day, for there to be justice, there also must be forgiveness.Storyline Blog