Forgiveness

Forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt those who hurt you. It’s not beating up the one or ones who beat you up. It’s the opposite of seeking justice or revenge. It’s embracing mercy, that at times is hard enough when apology and repentance happen, but feels impossible when they don’t happen, which is usually the way it is far too often. Most people never apologize for the hurt, pain, and offense they cause. Leaving the victim feeling hurt, broken, bleeding, victimized, and violated.

Forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt those who hurt you. It’s not beating up the one or ones who beat you up. How do you do that and why would you want to? Well, because most times you can’t and shouldn’t seek revenge outside of a justice system. Even then the process of justice isn’t restorative. Killing the one who killed a part of you, doesn’t bring back the part of you they killed. Ask Ericka Kirk, who even in her very apparent pain, publicly said she forgives the coward who assassinated her husband.

Forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt those who hurt you. It’s not beating up the one or ones who beat you up. Ask Jesus who was falsely accused, betrayed, arrested, and abandoned by his friends when the going got tough. While hanging crucified, beaten, bleeding and barely breathing on a cross he said out loud, in public, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing”. How could he do that? While it’s true Jesus is God, he’s also fully human like you and me and was tempted in every way we are to not forgive, yet he did (Luke 23:34, Colossians 1:15-17, Hebrews 4:15).  

Forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt those who hurt and offended you. It’s not beating up the one or ones who beat you up. Ask God who Adam and Eve sinned against and offended after he gave them everything, including one rule they didn’t keep. They caused problems in the paradise God gave them. Instead of killing them he graciously covered their nakedness that resulted from their sin against him, and in Jesus would forgive them. Yet Genesis 3 never says they repented and apologized to God.

While it’s right to repent and apologize when people hurt and offend others, and that the offender owes the offended, that often doesn’t happen. Most don't appologize. Forgiveness is not dependent on that. Forgiveness is a power stronger than the offender and the hurt and pain caused by the offender and the offense.

Forgiveness frees you the offended from the prison of pain of the offense. It is the powerful bandage that allows scabs to form and eventual healing to happen, that ends up making the hurt, bleeding, broken, abused, and falsely accused stronger than the offenders, because forgiveness is the power of God, of Jesus, in a believer. Just ask Ericka Kirk.  

Forgiveness isn’t forgetting the offense, because unlike God, we simply can’t “forgive and forget”. Forgiveness is a divinely powerful positive way of coping, dealing with, healing from, and becoming more powerful than the offense. Unlike with God / Jesus, it isn’t a one time and done. For all of us, it’s an everyday process, until you're rid of the hurt and pain of the offense the offender caused, which can take various lengths of time, depending on the hurt because everyone grieves and forgives differently. But forgiveness is essential to healing. Otherwise, the offended stays captive to the offender and the toxic effects of hurt, anger, pain, rage, bitterness, and victimization, that the offender doesn’t care about. Without forgiveness healing never happens as the offended carries around and periodically relive the hurt and pain the offender and offense caused in their life. In a weird way forgiveness takes the emotional pain out of the equation.

Like everyone, I’ve been hurt in life, recently by a very unjust thing that caused me, my wife and family great pain and anger. I could tell you I forgive the people who hurt me because they apologized, but they didn’t, or because God forgives us and tells us to forgive and could quote all the scriptural references, and all of that would be true and accurate. But the reason I started forgiving them a while ago, and do every day, is because I trust God and I got tired of living in the pain they and Satan through them, caused me.  

Forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt those who hurt you. It’s not beating up the one or ones who beat you up. It’s the opposite of seeking justice or revenge that is often a process of time, that frees you to live in the power of God, of Jesus, to heal, move on, and move forward to live an eventual healed and happy life again. Forgiveness stops carrying around the offender(s) and the offenses in your life.

Why I keep repeating forgiveness is giving up the right to hurt those who hurt you... is because it's important to remember that, that's how you know when you have. People can’t control how or when they’re offended, but they can control how and when they forgive, move forward in life and trust God to take care of the rest of it. Ask people like Ericka Kirk and to a much lesser extent me.  I forgive those who hurt me, in Jesus’ name.

Rory S. Grooters