Total Forgiveness: When Everything in You Wants to Hold a Grudge, Point a Finger, and Remember the Pain - God Wants You to Lay it All Aside

by R.T. Kendall

social scientists are discovering that forgiveness may help lead to victims’ emotional and even physical healing and wholeness. As recently as the early 1980s, Dr. Glen Hamden went to the University of Kansas library and looked up the word forgiveness in Psychological Abstracts. He couldn’t find a single reference. But things are changing. Former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former missionary Elisabeth Elliot have been promoting a $10 million “Campaign for Forgiveness Research,” established as a nonprofit corporation to attract donations that will support forgiveness research proposals. In 1998 the John Templeton Foundation awarded research grants for the study of forgiveness to twenty-nine scholars,4 and one of the primary discoveries of these studies is that the person who gains the most from forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving.