When it comes to forgiveness, I read a really great story in the book Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Waltz.
The story talked about a husband and wife who were having a rough patch in their relationship. The husband had cheated on his wife and he confessed to her. It was really hard but they worked through it with some counseling. She decided to forgive him and they stayed together.
Whenever he would do something to upset her, she would act very cold and distant to him. She would say something like “I have forgiven you but I haven’t forgotten.”
Doesn’t that mean she actually hadn’t forgiven him?
In order to forgive someone, we need to truly let go. We need to forget too. Otherwise, we are just holding onto their sins, throwing them in their face whenever we feel like it, and making sure they feel bad, while we continue to build up our resentment toward them.
That sounds awful. That doesn’t sound like forgiveness.
Forgiveness means we totally surrender. We give up our emotions to God or the Universe or whatever you believe in, but we have to let them go. It is impossible to forgive someone and hold on to those emotions. It doesn’t mean we can’t feel the emotions, but it means we need to stop soaking ourselves in them. In other words, it is impossible to forgive and NOT forget. The two go hand in hand.
Forgiveness is really a gift we give ourselves.
It is not about letting the other person off the hook, it is about letting ourselves off the hook. We get to be free if we truly forgive the other person. Forgiveness frees us from the bondage of anger. It destroys our fears. It opens up our connection with that person and it allows us to love them.
I don’t know about you, but whenever I have to be around someone I don’t love, I am miserable. If you don’t forgive someone who you spend a lot of time with, you are sentencing yourself to a life of misery with that person. Is it really worth it just to prove how hurt you are?
We owe it to ourselves to let go. We were created to be at peace, but as long as we hold onto our anger, we won’t be.
We need to forgive ourselves too.
By the way, other people are not the only people we need to forgive. We need to forgive ourselves too. For all the same reasons. We don’t spend nearly as much time with anyone else as much as we spend with ourselves, so we need to be sure we love ourselves. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long, sad life.
Are you willing to let go and forgive? Even more, are you willing to truly forget? I’m not saying it’s easy, but if we want to be free, we don’t have a choice. The good news is we don’t have to do it alone. God can take that burden off your shoulders. That is what He does. Let Him do what He does best.