I just settled in with my favorite…Wild Mountain Blueberry coffee…and it’s time to chat with you all again today, about forgiveness. I want to talk about the true benefactor of forgiveness. Who really benefits when we go about the business of forgiving someone?
It is widely thought that forgiveness is for the offender. If I’ve wronged you, I need you to forgive me in order for me to feel OK again. While receiving forgiveness from someone can go a long way toward repairing damage in a relationship, it is not necessary for healing in either direction, because each person has the ability within themselves to heal with or without it. The relationship may not be able to heal, but each person can.
What about the other side of that coin? How does forgiveness heal the forgiver? I think of it like having one of those huge grappling hooks that climbers use stuck into the middle of my chest. The end of the hook is piercing my heart. Forgiveness is the process of removing the hook, and it involves a lot of grieving. If I refuse to undergo this process, if I re
fuse to forgive the person who wronged me, I am agreeing to let the painful hook stay put in my heart. Then all anyone has to do to hurt me again and again is give a little tug on the rope and I’m instantly screaming in pain.
If I undergo the process of forgiving, and remove the hook from my heart, I am no longer attached to the pain or trauma that caused the hook to be there in the first place. I have released it, or let it go. Sounds wonderful, and like a much better way to live, but yet it is very hard to do. Why? Why do we want to hold on to these painful hooks in our heart?
I believe that the answer many times is because we equate saying “I forgive you” with saying “What you did was OK.” We learn that when we’re kids, don’t we? And if the offense is truly minor, like spilled milk, the effects of the offense really aren’t that dire. We can honestly say, “It’s OK.” But what if the effects of the offense ARE dire? In fact, what if they are so devastating that we will never be able to say to the person who hurt us, “That’s OK.” If we equate saying “I forgive you” to saying “It’s OK” and what happened means we will never be OK ever again, (for example perhaps the offense meant the death of a loved one) then we can’t forgive.
The truth is, you can unhook your heart from the pain without saying “It’s OK.” Those two phrases aren’t equal at all. In fact, you can say, “I forgive you, what you did is not OK, and I still want you to have the natural consequences for your actions.” All of that can be true at the same time. Grace in this way has the opportunity to stop a cycle of revenge and wrongdoing, and correct a humble heart. It may not save a relationship, but it can save a soul, or two, from all kinds of suffering.