Archive for March, 2007

Forgiveness

Thursday, March 15th, 2007

There is a lot of bad stuff that happens when you don’t forgive. Bitterness, anger, and hurt…just to name a few. But the odd thing is that it all happens to you, not to the person who hurt you. You’re the one who has to walk around with all that stuff inside you, eating you up.
The bottom line is that forgiveness is mostly for you…your health…your peace of mind…and mostly, your relationship with God.

But just because you realize you need to forgive doesn’t mean you’ve suddenly inherited a magic forgiveness prayer, or even the desire to do it. In fact, it’s hard. It’s really hard. Here are some steps:

# Make the decision to forgive, regardless of your feelings. They will eventually catch up with the whole forgiveness concept, but maybe not today.

# Pray that God will give you His Grace to do it. God’s grace is simply His power to do something with ease that you would struggle with if you try to do it on your own.

# Pray for the person who hurt you. Ouch. This is probably the hardest part of the whole concept. But when you pray for that person, God can reach into the situation and work.

# LEAVE the situation and person alone. Don’t try to avenge yourself. Ugh. Yeah right…it would be so much easier if you could just do some awful thing to make them look bad or feel bad or something! Don’t do anything. Let God do what He’s going to do and you focus on moving forward, doing whatever God tells you to do.