Forgiving

Hi

Someone passed this on to me earlier today:

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future. ”
Lewis B. Smedes

Forgiviness is an interesting concept, isn’t it? We often seem to want to hold on to a bitter memory because the other person involved doesn’t warrant our forgiveness; maybe we feel that they haven’t atoned enough or they don’t yet/won’t ever deserve to be forgiven.

Yet who is injured by our inability to forgive? It may sometimes be the other person, that’s true ….  but often they remain blissfully unaffected by the weight of our resentment, bitterness and anger.

The one person, the only person, truly affected by our inability to forgive is ourself. By choosing not to forgive we believe that we are valuing ourselves. We may feel that we are not yet ready to forgive and so we hold on to all those negative emotions for a little longer and then a little longer still … and over time we become used to having those negative emotions inside of us … they begin to feel comfortable, we have ‘worn them in’. Fast forward a little further still and we have stopped being able to see/feel the way in which these emotions affect us, eat us up, drain us of opportunties to feel contented in the world.

Why do we do this? In doing so we move from being the injured party to the injuring party …  if someone stole from us we wouldn’t then start throwing money away ourself to make them pay for what they had done, would we? The concept of self harming in the interest of making ’someone else pay’ just doesn’t make sense.

So, for our own sakes, maybe we should take the time to look inside. Is there anything we can let go of?

If so, let’s do it now – isn’t it time to look after us?

Isn’t it time to look inside and forgive …  forgiveness is for no one else’s benefit but our own. It enables us to live freely and to find true contentment.