Forgiveness is the act that helps another’s wrong to not become your wrong as well.
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Talking about forgiveness when you have been hurt or wronged is difficult and painful for most people; thinking about it can make your stomach knot and your skin crawl. That can be because you are associating the pain, the wrong, and the injury with the forgiveness. You are putting them both into the same equation—but it’s not really an equation. You can’t compare a beautiful, wonderful, and loving gift with an unkind, unloving, and hurtful act, nor should you try.
In order to free yourself to forgive, it helps to pull yourself away from this perspective. Don’t put the wrong done to you on one side of the scale and the choice to forgive on the other. It’s not a scale. The two sides will never balance. It will never be “fair.” That’s not really the point. The forgiving is for you. The forgiveness is how you will be healed.
The balancing and the restoration of equity and fairness, the retribution and judgment, is Mine to mete out. Leave that with Me. Don’t allow yourself to think on it, for it will only delay the healing that you could have. If someone has made you suffer, why should you add to your suffering? When you brood on harm and injury, when you stall on forgiving, you are prolonging and adding to your own suffering. When you forgive, you are expediting your healing.
This is a spiritual law and a spiritual truth: Forgiveness brings healing. It’s something you can’t fully understand until you do it. You don’t have to understand it before you do it. It only requires that you make the decision. It is an act of your will, a positioning of your heart.
Forgiveness is by faith. It is a choice that you make. And in making that choice, you are choosing to open yourself up to receive a supernatural and miraculous gift from the heavenly realm, for which there is no complete human explanation. Forgiveness can be likened to the opening of a portal to heaven, through which flows love, redemption, cleansing, healing, restoration, and renewal.
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I know how hard it is to forgive. Taking the step to forgive is a sign of great strength—strength in Me, and strength of character. But it is in forgiving that you find healing and restoration of joy in life, and the renewal of your spirit and the fading of the hurt.
The ability to forgive is a sign of strength of character. It’s not easy. It’s a conscious decision. It takes leaning hard on Me for the strength you cannot find in yourself. In fact, if you look at the situation logically before you make that choice to forgive, it may seem impossible—that’s how hard it is.
But it’s not impossible, because I’m here to help you, and I have limitless love and strength to give you. I want you to forgive because I want you to heal, I want you to be happy again, and I want you to grow stronger through the experience.
Isn’t that the case with the things in life that make you stronger? A hallmark of strengthening is that it’s not easy to go through. It pushes you to new limits. Forgiveness is no exception.
When you are hurt, you have to choose what you’ll do with that hurt. You can forgive and go on stronger than ever, or you can hold on to it and try to maintain, and eventually you’ll grow weaker. When you choose to forgive, you can find healing. If you don’t take that step of choosing to forgive, it can begin to taint the good in your life and your joy can slowly begin to slip away.
Know that I look with great love and compassion upon you when you face a situation where you must choose to forgive. I know how hard it is. But I also know how beautiful your life can be and what strength of character can result when you come through it. So lean hard on Me and find Me very present to help you.
When I’m trying to forgive someone, I picture myself physically lifting that person off a big hook, like in a cartoon. …
Earlier this year, a friend of mine made me really mad. Crazy mad. My therapist suggests that crazy mad is always covering over hurt and fear, so if we’re telling the whole truth here, she hurt me, and she made me feel scared. And that’s worse than just making me mad. I felt small and scared and out of control, and I felt like my friend was making decision after decision to hurt me. Every time I heard from her or about her, it hurt.
How do I forgive someone who doesn’t think she did anything wrong? Or who doesn’t care?
I think I could maybe do it if she groveled or begged. It would be even easier if she cried a lot. But nothing. No phone calls. No emails. … Why should I forgive someone who doesn’t even think she needs to be forgiven?
This is why. Because I want my neck and my back muscles to stop hurting, to unfurl like window shades. Because I want to sleep instead of having endless imaginary conversations. Because I want my mind back. Because I want my life back. Because she’s not the only one on the hook. Because every time I hang her up on that hook, the hook reaches down and grabs me, too.—Shauna Niequist1
Originally published August 2008. Adapted and republished May 2014.
Read by Jerry Paladino.
1 Cold Tangerines (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007), 165, 167.
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