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April 27 - May 4, 2025
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.
It is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.
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.
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.
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.
Forgiveness is a command. But it is not cruel. It is God’s divine mercy for human hearts that are so prone to turn hurt into hate.
“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 only needed to bring my willingness to forgive, not the fullness of all my restored feelings.
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 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.
Love needs depth to live. Love needs honesty to grow. Love needs trust to survive. When starved of depth, it flounders. When deprived of honesty, it shrivels. And when trust is broken, love is paralyzed.
Isn’t it strange that sometimes it’s the very thing we fear the most that winds up paving a road to freedom?
Everything lost that we place in the hands of God isn’t a forever loss.
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.
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.
Again, while I cannot change what happened, I get to choose what I now believe and how what happened changes me for better or worse.
We need to feel what we feel. We need to think through what we need to think through. We need to get it all out and sort it all out. And, most of all, we need to stay put and be present for it all.
In some cases, keeping the relationship going is simply not an option. But that doesn’t mean forgiveness is not an option. And even when reconciliation is possible, there is a lot of relationship work that must be done in the process of coming back together. 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
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It’s okay to carry both the desire to want things to change and an acceptance that on this side of eternity you can’t make everything or everyone change in the way you think they should. You can carry both. You can honor both.
Change can only happen for them from the inside out. Truly sustainable, lasting change must come from inside their own heart, not from pressure exerted from the outside in.
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.
God loves us too much to answer our prayers at any other time than the right time.
What makes faith fall apart isn’t doubt. It’s becoming too certain of the wrong things.
Either way, forgiveness is always healing in the right direction. Even if you don’t know whether to turn left or right, looking up to God is where real hope can be found. That’s where the payoff of forgiving is the sweetest of all.
Being bitter shouldn’t be equated to being a bad person. It’s most often a sign that a person with great potential for good filled the emptiness of their losses with feelings that are natural but not helpful in times of grief.
Hardened hearts have such a propensity to get shattered. Soft hearts don’t as easily break.
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.
In other words, peace in my life isn’t being prevented by other people’s choices. It’s made possible by my choices.
Maturity isn’t the absence of hard stuff. Maturity is the evidence that a person allowed the hard stuff to work for them rather than against them.
THIS IS FORGIVENESS: Making the decision that the ones who hurt you no longer get to limit you, label you, or project the lies they believe about themselves onto you.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean the one who hurt you is freed from the consequences of their sin. But it does mean we refuse the burden of taking revenge by trusting God to execute His justice with appropriate measures of mercy.
Jesus was treated unfairly and cruelly, yet He did not retaliate. He just let God have the final word.
