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Staying here, blaming them, and forever defining your life by what they did will only increase the pain. Worse, it will keep projecting out onto others. The more our pain consumes us, the more it will control us. And sadly, it’s those who least deserve to be hurt whom our unresolved pain will hurt the most.
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And those that are a tangle of both are yours to sort out into piles of keep and toss. It is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.
Cynicism dressed like a security guard, making me believe that if I hoped for less, it would protect me and prevent more pain. In reality, though, it was a thief in disguise, out to steal every bit of closeness between me and those I love. And, even worse, authentic intimacy between me and God.
forgiveness can seem offensive, impossible, and one of the quickest ways to compound the unfairness of being wronged. I cry for fairness. I want blessings for those who follow the rules of life and love. I want correction for those who break them.
Nor will it nod in the direction of forgiveness demanding all relationships work out with all people—sometimes
sometimes that’s neither possible nor safe.
But while it will offer truckloads of grace, it is fueled with God’s truth. After all, grace gives us the assurance that it’s safe enough to soften our fearful hearts, but it is the truth that will set us free (John 8:32). Grace and truth are kept together throughout Scripture (John 1:14, 17). If I only offered you grace, I would be shortchanging you on what it truly takes to heal. While the truth is sometimes hard to hear, God gives it to us because He knows what our hearts and souls really need. It is His truth that sets us free.
Forgiveness isn’t something hard we have the option to do or not do. Forgiveness is something hard won that we have the opportunity to participate in. Our part in forgiveness isn’t one of desperation where we have to muscle through with gritted teeth and clenched fists. It isn’t fighting through the irritation and wrestling down the indignation. It isn’t sobbing through the resistance of all our justifications to stay angry and hurt and horrified by all they
So He made a way not dependent on our strength. A forgiving way. A way to grab on to Jesus’ outstretched arms, bloody from crucifixion and dripping with redemption. He covers and forgives what we’ve only been able to hide. He forgives what we could never be good enough to make right. And makes a way for us to simply cooperate with His work of forgiveness—for us to receive and for us to give.
But please never confuse redemption with reunion. Reunion, or reconciliation, requires two people who are willing to do the hard work to come back together. Redemption is just between you and God. God can redeem your life, even if damaged human relationships don’t come back together.
And you and I can forgive, even if the relationship never gets restored.
Forgiveness isn’t always about doing something for a human relationship but rather about being obedient to what God has instructed us to do.
WHAT YOU GIVE UP: the right to demand that the one who hurt you pay you back or be made to suffer for what they’ve done. God will handle this. And even if you never see how God handles it, you know He will. WHAT YOU GET: the freedom to move on.
anything painful that we keep revisiting in our thoughts over and over again is worth addressing.
You hyperspiritualize what you’ve been through to the point where you deny your feelings rather than actually deal with your pain.”
When this world—so saturated with flesh resenting flesh, hearts hating hearts, fists slamming fists, pride rising against pride—suddenly sees someone dropping their sword and daring to whisper, “I forgive” . . . IT STOPS ALL. In the split second of that utterance, evil is arrested, heaven touches earth, and the richest evidence of the truth of the gospel reverberates not just that day but for generations to come. While salvation is what brings the flesh of a human into perfect alignment with the Spirit of God, forgiveness is the greatest evidence that the Truth of God lives in us. And none who
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if healing hasn’t been worked out and forgiveness hasn’t been walked out, chaos is what will continue to play out.
Acknowledge it.
Own them as mine to control.
And I can’t manage feelings I don’t own.
I can’t wait for another person to do something to make me feel better about the situation. If I need another person to make things right before I move toward change, I might stay unhealed for a very long time. I will paralyze my progress waiting for something that may or may not ever happen.
Blame hands the power to change over to the person who hurt me.
BC: Before Crisis. AD: After Devastation. Well, there’s a third line I’ve discovered. It’s RH: Resurrected Hope.
What we look for is what we will see. What we see determines our perspective.
And our perspective becomes our reality.
My ability to heal cannot depend on anyone’s choices but my own.
Isn’t it amazing that the man was so focused on what others needed to do that he almost missed what Jesus could do?
Jesus had compassion. Jesus had the power. Jesus didn’t make healing contingent on other people doing or owning anything. Jesus gave the instruction. The blind man obeyed. Jesus healed. The blind man moved forward.
One showed us a new way to walk. The other showed us a new way to see.”
“For me to move forward, for me to see beyond this current darkness, is between me and the Lord. I don’t need to wait on others to do anything or place blame or shame that won’t do anyone any good. I simply must obey whatever God is asking of me right now. God has given me a new way to walk. And God has given me a new way to see. It’s forgiveness. And it is beautiful.”
I have to place my healing in the Lord’s hands. I need to focus on what I can do to step toward Him in obedience.
And I have to separate my healing from any of this being fair.
My healing is my choice. I can heal. I can forgive. I can trust God. And none of those beautiful realities are held hostage by another person.
And it was His blood shed for our sins that was the redemptive ingredient that accomplished a forgiveness we could never have obtained or earned for ourselves.
My pain didn’t need to be validated by Art or vindicated by anyone else. It just needed to be verbalized—spoken out loud, acknowledged, recognized as real—and brought out into the light.
I only needed to bring my willingness to forgive, not the fullness of all my restored feelings.
For whatever my feelings didn’t allow, the work of Jesus on the cross could cover. It might take years for my feelings to be sorted out and healed . . . but the decision of forgiveness didn’t have to wait on all of that.
Forgiveness is both a decision and a process. You make the decision to forgive the facts of what happened. But then you must also walk through the process of forgiveness for the impact those facts have had on you.
The decision to forgive doesn’t fix all the damaged emotions. It doesn’t automatically remove the anger, frustration, doubt, damaged trust, or fear.
“And whatever my feelings don’t yet allow for, the blood of Jesus will surely cover. Amen.”
That’s how forgiveness is both a decision and a process. Each offense requires a marked moment of releasing the unforgiveness that threatens to hold us hostage and hold us back from moving forward.
your decision to forgive the facts of what happened is done in a specific moment in time. But the process of working through all the emotions from the impact of what happened will likely happen over time.
Forgiveness isn’t just about what’s in front of us. Sometimes, a bigger part of the journey is uncovering what is informing us from long ago. Woven throughout our experiences is a connecting thread that pulls the beliefs we formed from our past into the very present moments of today.
The greatest hell a human can experience here on earth is not suffering. It’s feeling like the suffering is pointless and it will never get any better.
But lots of people have issues I don’t know anything about. Unresolved issues and undealt-with wounds make people say and do things that can hurt.
What we experience all throughout life impacts the perceptions we carry. The longer we carry those perceptions, the more they become the truths we believe, live by, operate under, and use to help us navigate life today. It’s important to start making these connections between what happened in our growing-up years and the reasons we do some of the things we do, say some of the things we say, and believe some of the things we believe right now. And it’s not just processing for the sake of understanding ourselves better. It’s processing what still needs to be forgiven so we can truly move forward
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