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 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.

There is nothing more powerful than a person living what God’s Word teaches.

I cannot control things out of my control.

Destructive choices always affect more people than just the one who makes them. They also impact all those in relationship with them.

When someone is making destructive choices, it’s usually because they are hurting. As I’ve stated over and over, hurting people will hurt other people.

It truly is one of the most heartbreaking moments of anyone’s life when they have to release a loved one to the consequences of their own choices.

But saving someone isn’t possible if they don’t agree they need to be saved.

Now this doesn’t mean that I don’t continue to care about that person. Nor does it mean that I cut them out entirely, forever. But it does mean I change my role and my job description. I want them saved, but I am not their Savior. I want them to get better, but I cannot work harder at that than they can. They need Jesus. They need self-control. So, I shift from efforts of control to efforts of compassion.

Compassion lets me love that person, empathize with their pain, and acknowledge their side of things, even if I don’t agree with them. And it still allows me to speak into a situation. But after I share my wisdom, my advice, my discernment, I make the conscious choice not to rescue them in any way if they walk away and do the opposite.

And we should not enable them. How do we know when we’ve crossed over from weeping with them and having healthy empathy to enabling?

But the term can also be used for how we handle family members whose behaviors aren’t caused just by an addiction but also by other issues they refuse to acknowledge and expect others to go along with and accept as normal.

“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 ...

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 ...

So we have to make sure to be honest about the effect someone else is having on us and only be around them as much as our reactions and actions have the capacity to handle.

Boundaries aren’t to push others away. They are to hold me together. Otherwise, I will downgrade my gentleness to hastily spoken words of anger and resentment. I will downgrade my progress with forgiveness to bitterness. I will downgrade my words of sincerity to frustrated words of anger, aggression, or rude remarks.

What kind of person do I want to be, not just in this relationship but consistently in all my relationships? •What do I need to do in this relationship to stay consistent in my character, conduct, and communication? •What are some areas of my life where I have the most limited capacity? (Examples: at my job, in parenting, during the holidays.)

Based on my realistic assessment of capacity, how does this relationship threaten to hyperextend what I can realistically and even generously give? •Do I feel the freedom in this relationship to communicate what I can and cannot give without the fear of being punished or pushed away? •What are some realistic restrictions I can place on myself to reduce the access this person has to my most limited emotional or physical resources? •What time of the day is most healthy for me to interact with this person?

What time of the day is the most unhealthy time for me to interact with this person? •In what ways is this person’s unpredictable behavior negatively impacting my trust in my other relationships? •How am I suffering the consequences of their choices more than they are? •What are their most realistic and most unrealistic expectations of me? What are my most realistic and most unrealistic expectations of them? •What boundaries do I need to put in place?

And, honestly, it’s time to train some people how to treat us.

But it is important for us all to know, moving forward, that we can verbalize what is and is not acceptable in the context of relationships.

But, friend, let’s remember that what we allow is what we will live.

When I sense their actions are constantly having a negative impact on my mood and reactions, I can reduce their access to my most vulnerable emotions and limited resources. I’m not just doing this for myself; I am also doing this for the other people I do life with. It is unfair for someone who isn’t respecting

my boundaries to constantly send me into a funk and risk me taking it out on others.

Inside my head, I flat-out told God I could no longer believe for something so impossible. I trusted Him to help me survive. But to really bring something this dead alive? I was too tired and traumatized by what I could no longer see to hope beyond the obvious.

I learned God loves us too much to answer our prayers at any other time than the right time.

The most devastating spiritual crisis isn’t when we wonder why God isn’t doing something. It’s when we become utterly convinced He no longer cares.

Past seasons where I have seen God’s faithfulness remind me that I don’t always see God working in the midst of my hard days.

But God isn’t oblivious to what’s happening. You don’t have to wait for Him to pick up the line to become aware of the problem.

And I absolutely believe that forgiveness, even in the midst of all the unknowns, is the way we stay in step with the beat of God’s heart. The more we forgive, the more we can know we are right in step with God, no matter what direction our life goes.

What if we’ve been looking at things from only what we think is good? From our vantage point, we

can clearly see how what we’re asking from God makes so much sense. In our minds, we see all the good that would surely come from Him doing exactly what we suggest. But what if our requests, though completely logical and reasonable, aren’t what we think they are?

Yes, from an earthly perspective, they are exactly what makes sense. But what if God sees things we can’t possibly see? What if, from His perspective, what we are asking for is not at all what we’d want if we could see ev...

Since trust in relationships is built in part with good communication, then more effectively praying has to play a role in my trust with God.

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.

Or, I’ve looked at prayers like Amazon Prime deliveries. I want what’s delivered to look like what I expected and to arrive in record time. The answer will be delivered to my front door right away, and I feel so close to God because He did what I wanted! But there’s something too human and predictable about that being the way prayer actually works. Then my prayers become orders I place, the answers as cheap as products, and the sender nothing more than a far-removed entity I give little thought to until I need something else.

Only God can see what’s missing in our lives as we ask for His provision.

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.

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 activity and His answers don’t look like you thought they would.

I titled this chapter “Forgiving God,” not because God needs to be forgiven. But sometimes, in the middle of deep hurt, our hearts can start to wrongly believe God is at fault.

No matter what we see, when an argument or opinion enters our mind that speaks against God’s goodness, we don’t entertain it; we destroy it before it starts causing destruction in us.

Sin only makes us think that what we see on earth is all there is to know.

I was just looking at the hardest place and thinking it was the end. I missed something so important. Something I now see. What things look like from an earthly perspective God sees differently.

But I seem to live in denial until I’m forced not to. And no matter if we know the one who passed away or not, we pause at the shocking nature of loss.

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.

Loss is maddening. Loss is shrinking. Loss is reducing. But what does all this talk of loss have to do with forgiveness? Sitting in this loss, in fresh grief, can be a good cure for bitterness.

When your personal loss came because of another person’s foolishness, selfishness, meanness, or irresponsibility, sorrow can quickly invite bitterness you didn’t even know you were capable of.

We are making sure not one bit of the hurt done to us is multiplied by us.

A grudge that feels increasingly heavy inside you •The desire for the one that hurt you to suffer

Becoming unexplainably withdrawn in situations you used to enjoy