Forgiving What You Can't Forget Quotes

“C. S. Lewis wrote, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Coping mechanisms, like being overly positive or hyperspiritual or using substances to numb out, may get us through the short term. But in the long run they don’t help us cope;”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“For a while, you may still have tears that come and go. That’s okay. Freedom from unforgiveness doesn’t mean instant healing for all the emotions involved. But it does mean those emotions will turn into eventual compassion rather than bitterness.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Remember those markings of time? BC: Before Crisis. AD: After Devastation. Well, there’s a third line I’ve discovered. It’s RH: Resurrected Hope.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Now put your fingers on your pulse. Do you feel that? It’s your heart beating, pumping, willing you to press onward and upward. Your future is FULL OF POSSIBILITY and new joys you don’t want to miss. So get a bit carried away dancing to that song . . . you know, the one that, when its rhythm gets turned up all the way, makes it impossible for you to stay down.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

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

“After all I’ve given you . . . all the ways I’ve been patient with you, all the ways I’ve tried to help you. . . . THIS IS HOW YOU’RE GOING TO TREAT ME?!”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“I am skeptical of trusting some people, not because of what they’ve done but what’s been done to me by others.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Forgiveness is supposed to be as much a part of our daily lives as eating and sleeping.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Have one better thought. Have one better reaction. Have one better way to process. Have one better conversation. Have one boundary you lovingly communicate and consistently keep. Have one better choice not to reach for that substance to numb out. Have one better heart pivot toward forgiveness instead of resentment. Have one less day when you stay mad.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“The sign of progress is to let the pain work for you instead of against you. Use it as an opportunity to let the pain drive you to the new healing habits and perspectives we’ve been discovering together”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“can’t pretend that I would sometimes rather dance with dysfunction than to have the harder conversations about boundaries.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Undealt-with pain and a mind at peace cannot coexist.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Not forgiving someone isn’t teaching the other person a lesson, nor is it protecting you in any way. It’s making the choice to stay in pain.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Peace is the evidence of a life of forgiveness. It’s not that the people all around you are peaceful or that all your relationships are perfectly peaceful all the time. Rather, it’s having a deep-down knowing that you’ve released yourself from the binding effects of the constricting force of unforgiveness and the constraining feelings of unfairness.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“The Greeks thought of peace as the absence of hostility.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Bitterness is a bad deal that makes big promises on the front end but delivers nothing you really want on the back end.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“All bitterness is corrosive. It eats away at our peace. And most of us aren’t making the connection that the heaviness and unsettledness that ebbs and flows in our lives is evidence of unforgiveness.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Me not forgiving the people who hurt me was agreeing to bring the hurt they caused into every present-day situation I was in—hurting me over and over and over again. Holding on to this hurt wasn’t diminishing my pain. It was multiplying it. And it was manipulating me to become someone I didn’t want to be.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“If our reaction is hysterical, it is historical.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“And while we all know we are in control of our own reactions, when deep pain gets poked, it’s only natural for our reaction to be more of a reflex of past hurts than a spiritually mature calmness.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

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

“Funerals have such a way of reminding us not to leave important things, kind things, unsaid.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Usually the bitter heart is the heart with the greatest ability to love deeply. But when you love deeply, you are at the greatest risk of being hurt deeply. And when that deep hurt comes, it seems to cage the love that once ran wild and free. Caged love often has a bitter cry.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“they stop caring for others, they won’t have to fear getting close enough for their trust to get broken again. Hardness is often the exact opposite way their heart was made to operate, but it’s the only way they know to protect themselves.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Bitterness isn’t usually found most deeply in those whose hearts are hard but rather in those who are most tender. It’s not that they are cold; it’s that they’ve been made to feel unsafe. This is a caring person who trusted someone or some people they should have been able to trust. And they were made to feel like a fool when the trust they gave as a gift was trampled and shattered.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“Bitterness doesn’t have a core of hate but rather a core of hurt.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

“However loss comes, it hurts. We all identify with the pain of loss. We have all lost people we once hugged and held and allowed a kind of merging of us with them. And whether they walked away, moved away, drifted away, shoved away, faded away, or passed away, the awayness created a phantom feeling where, out of habit, we reach for them but they’re no longer there. We dial their number to no avail. We run our fingers across photographs but cannot feel the warmth of their skin. The loss of inside jokes and shared late-night whispers and conflicts and carpools and cookouts and differing opinions and all the other million little daily ways “together” is made. The story of our lives included us both. And now it doesn’t. This is loss. Loss is maddening. Loss is shrinking. Loss is reducing.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

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