Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

by Lysa TerKeurst

and no one will take away your joy. (John 16:20–22)

He promised the grief would turn into joy. The grief would produce the joy. The grief was a part of the journey, but it would not be the way it would all end.

It is most remarkable and instructive that the apostles do not appear in their sermons or epistles to have spoken of the death of our Lord

with any kind of regret. The gospels mention their distress during the actual occurrence of the crucifixion, but after the resurrection, and especially after Pentecost, we hear of no such grief.3

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Then His death was the very thing that paid the debt of sin we could never pay ourselves. It sealed our forgiveness for all eternity. And pointed to the resurrection promise providing new life, perfect redemption, and eternal security once and for all.

Getting hurt by what God allows can feel unbearable.

Sometimes worst-case scenarios do happen. Hasn’t this last season of our life made that crystal clear? Why won’t you people listen to me?

trusting God when I don’t understand what He’s doing. What He’s allowing. I cannot see with my eyes or rationalize with my brain how any of this is God’s answered prayer. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is the place where it’s time to start rebuilding trust with God.

“God, help me to see what is in front of me as my answered prayer.”

“Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely” (13:12 NLT, emphasis mine).

We feel the ache of a need and naturally fill in the blank of what we think we need. But our lives are like a jumble of puzzle pieces. We are just slowly putting things together piece by piece, and while we make some connections of how things fit together, we don’t yet see the full picture. Therefore, we can’t possibly know exactly what’s missing.

God sees it all crystal clear. He’s never unsure or afraid or intimidated by the gaps. He allows missing pieces so that we don’t have to do it all on our own. This is where His provision fits in. He always sees the shape of the missing pieces and gives us a portion

of Himself, which sometimes looks like a loaf, other times manna, but m...

In 1 John 2:1 Jesus is called our advocate, meaning He sits at the right hand of God and intercedes for us (Romans 8:34). He is talking to the Father about you right now in ways that, if you could hear Him, would make you never afraid of what is in front of you. You wouldn’t question His love for you or His goodness to you. Therefore, we don’t need to forgive God. We need to trust Him.

He told us to think of ourselves as a house God is renovating. We think we know what work needs to be done—maybe some small repairs here and there—and then He starts knocking down walls. We are confused and feeling the pain of this level of rebuilding. But maybe His vision is much different than ours. “You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”1

God is building something we cannot even fathom. It’s not what we wanted, but it is so very good. And in the end, maybe it’s not what God is working on but how God is working in us that matters most of all.

So, pray what you know to pray. Pray what you need to pray. Pray all the words and let the tears flow into sobs and demands and frustrations and doubts mixed with hope. But then let the faithfulness of God interpret what you see. Let the faithfulness of God build your trust. Let the faithfulness of God ease the ache of your confusion and bitterness and bewilderment. God’s faithfulness

isn’t demonstrated by His activity aligning with your prayers. It’s your prayers aligning with His faithfulness and His will where you become more and more assured of His activity. Even if, maybe especially if, His activ...

When the evils of this world rage around us and terrible tragedies break our hearts, it is understandable why we weep, bang our fists on the steering wheel, scream out very hard words, feel consumed by the seemingly never-ending unfairness of it all, and wrestle through all the questions berating our grief-filled souls.

What we see today isn’t all there is to see. Our thinking and our ways are imperfect.

If we can’t understand God’s thoughts and His ways on our best days, we certainly will not be able to understand

them on our worst days. The apostle Paul was very direct with his instructions that we are to destroy arguments and opinions ...

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 ESV)

God does some of His best work in the unseen.

LOSS IS A CRUCIBLE. It presses into the deepest places from which we loved, causing such pain we often don’t know how to make sense of the despair. Memories as crystal clear as if they were happening right now dance in front of us, letting us see the beauty of what used to be our life on replay. But those replays make us cry. Seeing what once was is as cruel as it is beautiful.

The sacred nature of grief ripples into our lives even when we didn’t personally break bread with the one who has passed away. We can grieve because we are not strangers to human hurt, even if we are strangers by definition.

However loss comes, it hurts. We all identify with the pain of loss.

Because if loss was the way bitterness got in, maybe revisiting grief will help provide a way out.

Bitterness wears the disguises of other chaotic emotions that are harder to attribute to the original source of hurt.

Bitterness doesn’t have a core of hate but rather a core of hurt.

Bitterness isn’t usually found most deeply in those whose hearts are hard but rather in those who are most tender. It’s

Protection is often the motivation behind bitter projections.

Bitterness isn’t an indication of limited potential in relationships.

Undealt-with hurt and pain hardens like parched soil. And the only way to soften it afresh is for the tears to fall soft and liquid and free-flowing once again.

First, you start with a little water . . . about a half inch. You don’t drown it. You let the ground take in the water slowly. Then you let it sit for a couple of days, so the water has time to sink below the surface. After that, you can dig down about eight inches to overturn the ground below, exposing it to the surface. You then spray the overturned soil with a fine stream of water to soften

the surface before raking it and adding compost—organic material once alive, now decomposed. What could have been waste becomes fertilizer. I am not a gardener of the earth. But all of this seems to be so applicable to my desire to tend to the hard places of my heart. In a spiritual sense, this resonates with how to turn hard bitterness into fertile soil. You don’t beat bitterness out of someone. You don’t point at and poke it out, or plead with it or provoke it out of someone.

Perspective is the best fertilizer there is. What we’ve gone through is not a waste when it fertilizes

the softened ground of our hearts, increasing the chances for new life to thrive.

And when God allows things that soften and till us, we must remember it is for us, just like it is for the farmer’s land. The farmer knows what is good for the ground just like God knows what is good for the human heart. They both see such potential for new life, new fruit, and new, beautiful beginnings.

“What you are going through is hard, and my heart grieves along with you. I may not know your exact pain, but I know it hurts. So, as an act of compassion, I’m going to sit with your grief tucked in my heart today and let it teach me something as I pray for you.”

Bitterness is in part unprocessed grief, so it only makes sense that, by sitting in a part of the grief process of another, we can revisit the processing of our own losses.

In the Jewish culture there is a framework for processing the loss of a loved one. Knowing what to do with loss is incredibly helpful. So, as I’ve studied this and talked to a Jewish friend, I’m making note of what this can teach me.

Grief is always acknowledged. And none of it is done in isolation. The healing comes through processing loss together. The way in is the way out.

softening the soil of your heart doesn’t always have to start with stepping into a loss as significant as the death of a loved one.

Regardless of the size of the loss, the accompanying grief is real. And worth processing. And able to create a softening of whatever hard places exist inside my own heart.

our reaction is hysterical, it is historical.” We can feel so very out of control if bitterness and resentments are part of how we’ve recorded events in our history.

Resentment is usually attached to a specific person for a specific incident. Bitterness is usually the collective feeling of all our resentments. But however