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

The ability to see beautiful again is what I want for you and for me. Forgiveness is the weapon. Our choices moving forward are the battlefield. Moving on is the journey. Being released from that heavy feeling is the reward. Regaining the possibility of trust and closeness is the sweet victory. And walking confidently with the Lord from hurt to healing is the freedom that awaits.

My ability to forgive others rises and falls, instead, on this: leaning into what Jesus has already done, which allows His grace for me to flow freely through me (Ephesians 4:7).

Forgiveness isn’t an act of my determination. Forgiveness is only made possible by my cooperation.

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.

Those who cooperate most fully with forgiveness are those who dance most freely in the beauty of redemption.

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.

The scenery for your life should not be the pit of pain that person dragged you down into. There’s so much more to see and discover and experience. Let go of clawing your way through the muddy pit, hoping there’s some reward buried there. There’s not. Take God’s hand, and, as the words of forgiveness are released from your lips, it’s like scattering seeds of beautiful flowers. The mud of the pit becomes fertile soil with potential. And before long you’ll be dancing through all that has blossomed and bloomed around you.

I know what it feels like to have been hurt so deeply that forgiveness feels like a command too cruel for you to consider. Or, it’s a spiritual theory you might think about one day after a lot more time has passed. Or, it’s a topic you’ve been avoiding and don’t care to discuss.

I know what it’s like to look around a room, eyes glassy with pain, and feel so very alone. Friend, you aren’t alone here. And you won’t be judged as you wrestle through this message.

He came for us with forgiveness pulsing through the very blood He would one day shed. He wouldn’t allow forgiveness to be shoved away with human justifications. For in the very instance we think we have landed on the forgiveness limitation, Jesus blows it apart with His multiplication (seventy times seven) and His declaration that we must not entertain unforgiveness when we have been so very forgiven by God Himself.

Forgiveness is not adding on top of your pain a misery too great to bear. It is exchanging bound-up resentment for a life-giving freedom, thus making the mystery of the workings of God too great to deny. On earth we usually only get to see people operating in the flesh.

Unhealed hurt often becomes unleashed hurt spewed out on others. It’s so very common to be so very offended.

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When you’ve been deeply wounded by another person, it’s only natural to be shocked by their utter lack of humanity. It’s understandable to wish your life would have never, ever intersected with theirs. To assume the hell you are now forced to live with is absolutely directly connected to a choice they made that can never be unmade. To feel haunted by a shadow version of the offender who caused this, and to almost feel like they are following you around while you replay their cruel act in your mind over and over and over. To feel forever changed in ways you don’t want to be.

Regardless, if healing hasn’t been worked out and forgiveness hasn’t been walked out, chaos is what will continue to play out.

I can heal. I can forgive. I can trust God. And none of those beautiful realities are held hostage by another person. Healing will take time. But I must move forward toward it if I ever hope to get there. And forgiveness is a good step in the right direction. Not just good, but necessary.

While I can look forward to eternity one day, I don’t have to wait to live out my heavenly citizenship. I can bring heaven to earth today by living in such a forgiving way that my choices line up with God. Think about the Lord’s Prayer: “[God’s] will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). My heart is most at home in the safety of God’s truth. Like the verse from Hebrews says, He will equip me with all I need to do this. He will empower me to do what He instructs. And so I run toward the forgiveness God commands. And only then will I find the healing peace He offers.

Hurt feelings sometimes don’t want to cooperate with holy instructions. That’s why I have to add some of what Jesus did on the cross into this process. The cross was the most holy act of forgiveness that ever took place. 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.

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. To work on those emotions, we must now start the process of forgiving that person for the impact.

Remember, the decision to forgive acknowledges the facts of what happened. But the much longer journey of forgiveness is around all the many ways these facts affected you—the impact they created.

But if you’re still struggling with unresolved feelings, that’s understandable. As my counselor has explained to me, 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.

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.

The secret is, we can help each other remember who we really are. But we can’t fix each other. We can’t control each other. We can’t keep each other healthy. We can speak life. We can be vulnerable. We can pray. We can battle the enemy. We can lift up all concerns to the Lord, and we can navigate concerns with each other. But we must not let the destructive force of shame into any part of our relationship. It is returning to what God always intended relationships to be.

Any sacrifice placed in the hand of God, God can bring good from. And maybe that’s the first lesson for what makes vulnerability so complicated. If we risk being open, we risk being hurt. We risk the other person taking something from us. And we know to fear this pain, because, unlike Adam and Eve, we’ve experienced this pain. So we pull back and we get bitter and we become more and more easily offended and less and less willing to be vulnerable.

Not everything that’s been taken from us was by the hand of God. But when I mentally place each and every loss in His hands, it can be redeemed. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24 ESV). Loss is never the end of the story.

We can’t change what we have experienced, but we can choose how the experiences change us.

Like so much of my story—such a mix of God sometimes moving and then sometimes, well, I can’t understand where God was and I can’t see evidence of what He was doing. But maybe that’s the part called faith. My trust gets built when I see God’s work with my human eyes. But what builds my faith is when I can’t see or understand what He does. Instead, I choose to place my trust in who He is and declare Him good in the midst of all the unknowns.

We have to get to the place where the pain we’ve experienced is a gateway leading toward growing, learning, discovering, and eventually helping others. But if the pain is what I’m simply running into over and over, it’s a stop-gate preventing me from getting over or getting through this situation. It’s like running into a brick wall again and again, never understanding why my pain is just increasing day by day.

Forgiveness isn’t nearly as hard for me when I have a healthier system of processing my thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions and beliefs about my circumstances, people, myself, and God. But when you’ve been deeply hurt, it’s hard to have any thoughts about what happened other than the most obvious. We can easily assume bad things are caused by bad people causing bad realities that will never be anything but bad. That’s an oversimplification but an unfortunate trap of thinking I’ve been stuck in for years.

Forgiveness doesn’t let the other person off the hook. It actually places them in God’s hands.

And it’s very hard to have compassion for someone who’s shown you no compassion at all. So, instead of starting at the place of trying to have compassion for someone who has hurt you, start with having compassion for the pain they had to experience in order to make the choices they made. The one who causes pain is in pain. I don’t have to know anything about their wounding to know that hurt exists. At some point, someone brutalized their innocence. Or made them feel terrified, tossed aside, beaten down, invisible, unseen, unwanted, or shamed. Chances are, it was a combination of several of those feelings.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean that trust is immediately restored or that hard relational dynamics are instantly fixed. The point of forgiveness is to keep your heart swept clean, cooperating with God’s command to forgive and keeping yourself in a position to be able to receive God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness doesn’t always fix relationships, but it does help mend the hurting heart.

Part of what makes forgiveness so complicated at times for me is when I have warned the person I love in advance that if they make this decision it is going to cost both of us a price neither of us in a sane, rational moment would want to pay. The more deeply I am invested in someone, the more their choices affect me. The more their choices affect me, the more their bad decisions cost me emotionally, physically, mentally, and financially.

Forgiveness is already complicated enough when someone hurts you. But when it feels as if they are intentionally flushing your life along with theirs down the toilet while you stand by helpless to do a darn thing about it, it can render you so powerless that the only thing you have to take a stand against the madness is unforgiveness.

My counselor, Jim Cress, says, “I am enabling someone when I work harder on their issues than they are working. I am enabling someone when I allow them to violate my boundaries without any consequences. I enable a person when I cosign their unhealthy behavior by defending them, explaining for them, looking the other way, covering for them, lying for them, or keeping secrets for them. I enable a person by blaming other people or situations for their unhealthy or irresponsible behavior.”

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Remember, forgiveness shouldn’t be an open door for people to take advantage of us. Forgiveness releases our need for retaliation, not our need for boundaries.

It’s for the sake of your sanity that you draw necessary boundaries. It’s for the sake of stability that you stay consistent with those boundaries.

When I think about prayer requests, I think of what I “hope” God will do . . . not what “has been done” for today. The reason I miss seeing what I’m living today as the answer to my prayers is that very often, maybe even always, it’s not what I thought it would be. God’s answers don’t look like what I have pictured so clearly in my mind. And this is what complicates my prayer life; it all feels so unknown and uncertain.

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 most of all like Jesus.

The loaf of bread may be what I want from God—maybe even what I expect from God—but if it doesn’t look like I think it should, it can make me question His love or maybe even begin to resent Him for not coming through. I want His provision to look the way I think it will. But isn’t the loaf the least miraculous of all the forms of bread? It’s the kind of provision we have to work to receive from the ground. We harvest the wheat and process it and then bake it—all with our own hands. But maybe that’s what I like so much about the loaf of bread. Since I’m working for it, I have a sense of control.

But if God isn’t giving His provision to us in the way we expect right now, then we must trust there’s something God knows that we don’t know. We may see it in time, or not until eternity. But until we see it, we can know with certainty that what He gives us truly is His good provision, whether that good is for today or part of a much bigger plan. Even when what we see in front of us feels confusing. Even when what we see in front of us isn’t at all what we thought it would look like. Even when we don’t agree that this is good. We don’t have to understand God to trust Him.

But sometimes, in the middle of deep hurt, our hearts can start to wrongly believe God is at fault. When we truly feel we’ve asked God for something urgently necessary, good, right, and holy, like saving a marriage or a loved one’s life or preventing something horrific from happening, and God doesn’t do it? We wouldn’t say He sinned, but we very much may feel betrayed by Him. Or disillusioned by Him. Or possibly wonder if God even cares about us.

Sometimes people can have hidden agendas and skewed motives. Sometimes people lie. Sometimes people don’t seek a greater good. But none of this is true about God. He is good. He is the only source of making anything good out of everything in front of me. Trusting God with all of this is what my soul was made to do. I guess it just takes time for my battered heart and my prone-to-fear mind to catch up.

But what about when grief comes not because a loved one died, but because they chose to reject us? When someone just packs their things because they no longer want to love us, the loss is excruciating. We don’t just grieve their absence. We grieve their utter lack of care for what their choice is doing to us.

Sitting in this loss, in fresh grief, can be a good cure for bitterness.

Resentment is usually attached to a specific person for a specific incident. Bitterness is usually the collective feeling of all our resentments. But however you define those words, they are part of the same problem.

are you angry that you haven’t seen evidence of God defending you?”

Living in the comfort of peace is so much better than living in the constraints of unforgiveness.

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:19–21 ESV)