Forgive and Forget

                                                                                                                                                Forgiving is one of the most difficult things we must do. It doesn’t mean saying what the person did was OK. It means saying I will no longer hold it over you, keep bringing it up every time I’m mad at you, or harbor bitterness toward you.

Bitterness is a poison that can shrivel your soul. It can turn you into a person no one wants to be in. It can seep into the lives of those you love, and cause more pain than the original offense. When we forgive, we drain the poison and cauterize the wound in order to keep from becoming infected ourselves. Bitterness and unforgiveness hurts you more than it hurts the unforgiven one. Often they don’t even realize how they’ve hurt you.

That brings us to forgetting. The scar will always be there, but you will choose not to bring up the injury again. It is not that you have wiped it out of your memory, but that you have wiped it out of your arsenal to use as a weapon against the person that hurt you.

Understanding the above is one of the best ways to begin to forgive and forget. When we understand what forgiveness is and what not forgiving can do to our spirit, mind and even body that we are able to let it go. It is not that the person deserves to be forgiven so much as that I deserve to forgive. Forgiveness gives ME a better life and unforgiveness doesn’t. It’s that simple. It is not that easy however. Sometimes we have to forgive repeatedly until we have it. We forgive and then pick it back up again. When we stop picking it back up, that is when we have ‘forgotten’.

Remembering how much we have been forgiven also helps us forgive and forget. Even if you don’t believe you are a sinner saved by the grace of the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ, you know that you have hurt others. Sometimes we don’t intend to hurt, and we never even know how deeply we have hurt someone else. It is our tendency to justify our own wounding and maximize our own wounds anyway. If we expect forgiveness, we must forgive.

When I was dealing with trying to forgive some people in my life, I posted the following forgiveness meditation around my house and read it every day until it sunk in. It changed my thoughts about forgiveness forever. It is taken from “Food for Love: Healing the Food, Sex, Love & Intimacy Relationship” by Janet Greeson, Ph.D. (p. 154)

-Forgiveness is not the denial of a wrongdoing. It frees ourselves, not
the offender, from all responsibility for the abuse.
-Forgiveness means I give up the victim role in all its familiarity and
occasional payoffs.
-Forgiveness means I give up the power to inflict guilt and to seek vengeance.
-Forgiveness breaks the tie that binds me to the offender.
-Forgiveness brings the peace I have always been seeking.
-Forgiveness emancipates my spirit from my prison of shame.
-Forgiveness connects and bonds me to my spirit. I forgive to set that
spirit free.
-I forgive.