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Those who cooperate most fully with forgiveness are those who dance most freely in the beauty of redemption. And what exactly is this beautiful redemption? It is you accepting the exchange God is offering. 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.
Hanging on to a grudge gives me a sense of control in a situation that’s felt so unfair.
Forgiveness feels like it trivializes, minimizes, or, worse yet, makes what happened no big deal.
They haven’t apologized or even acknowledged that what they did was wrong.
Even if every best-case scenario played out with the people who hurt me suddenly being utterly repentant and owning every bit of all they’d done, that wouldn’t undo what happened. That wouldn’t erase the damage.
I had to separate my healing from their choices. My ability to heal cannot depend on anyone’s choices but my own.
My ability to heal cannot be conditional on them wanting my forgiveness but only on my willingness to give it.
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.
Remember, our decision to forgive happens in a marked moment like the one I had with the 3×5 cards. But there’s also a process of forgiving the impact that all this had on me that will unfold for years to come.
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’t change what we have experienced, but we can choose how the experiences change us.
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.
Humanity without humility makes true forgiveness impossible.
