Forgiveness has been something the Lord has been pushing at me for a while now. At first I would ignore it, saying “Yeah, I know, I need to forgive this person and that person thanks for reminding me. I’ll deal with it later.” I thought I had the right to just talk back to Him like that and basically ignore what He was telling me. I had a list in my head of people I needed to forgive and I thought once I forgive I’d be free and able to move on. That’s what I had convinced myself to be true…how silly was I?
Forgiveness isn’t something that comes easy, it’s not something you can just check off your to-do list, it’s not something thats handed to you on a silver platter for you to just pick up and take care of. To forgive is a choice you make, it takes time, it takes work, it takes a whole lot of prayer, and a whole lot of vulnerability. Like I said, I thought I had this handled. I thought I could just forgive the people on my “forgive” list and put that behind me whenever I had time. Turns out I was wrong (big surprise, right?). Apparently the more you say “whenever I have time I’ll do it”, no matter what it is, you’d never get around to doing whatever that may be. Eventually, I had to have reality check with God in which He told me that I have not even scratched the surface of forgiveness in a lot of areas of my life. Yeah, I’ve been through some hard things, people have hurt me, I’ve told myself they were forgiven, but I was wrong in that too. Forgiveness isn’t something you can just do on your own. It’s a choice you make to work alongside the Lord to hand off the things in your life that have hurt you to Him rather than carrying it on your own shoulders.
This journey of learning what forgiveness is and how to handle forgiveness for me really all started before training camp. During a time of vulnerability with my small group, I opened up to them about some pain that I was dealing with because of what someone had done to me. After that, I was asked if I had forgiven the person and my response was “I don’t know how”. That, my friend, was the start of my actual forgiveness journey that I am still on and will never be off of. I started to ask a lot of questions to Jesus and the people I trust about what forgiveness really is. What I was told (in short) was that I had to give the pain the person had given to me to God. To hand off all that that person had meant to me into the hands of God. Sounds easy right? Just have a talk with God and say “Hey, so this person hurt me and I’m tired of feeling that pain so here ya go, I’m handing it off to you.” No, it’s not that easy. Usually, when God brings up things that you need to use forgiveness for it’s for a deeper rooted issue than you are aware of.
Fast forward a couple months after that small group night to training camp. One night we had a “Forgiveness Talk” in which we were taught about forgiveness, what it means, how to do it, and how it feels after. It was put in list-form for us, so I’ll do the same for you all.
Get connected with God’s forgiveness
We are deeply sinful
We are created with a purpose
We are greatly loved
Make a choice to forgive.
It’s a gift from one person to another
Don’t wait until you feel like it, suck it up and do it
Make sure you offer forgiveness to the full level of offense (so, make sure you’re forgiving every last bit, not just the surface stuff)
Make sure you forgive ALL of it (I guess that’s pretty important)
Pray blessing
Pray that God will bring great things into their life/lives (Do this until you really, truly mean it. It might take a few tries, which is okay.)
Make a conscious choice to keep living like this (It’s so much better than being so salty)
“I will die with no enemies.”
After going through this list, the speaker, Bill Swan (great man), shared a little of his testimony with us in which he needed to forgive someone, he didn’t for a long time, he eventually did, and now he isn’t salty towards that person! Some other people shared stories of how they worked with God to forgive someone who had hurt them, how much time and effort it took, and how wonderful they feel now that they are not carrying that pain anymore. We were asked to open up to someone and to have them pray over you if you need help with forgiveness. Most people in the room jumped on the opportunity to get prayed over, meaning most people have been hurt and need to work on forgiveness big time. When I went up to talk to someone, I couldn’t even form my words. I didn’t really know how to put into words what I was feeling so , naturally, I started crying (really gross ugly crying, have fun picturing that mess), I wasn’t making any sense, and the wonderful woman just put her hands on my shoulders and prayed for me… it was great.
I will share with you all a little bit of my story in which forgiveness has become a very big factor. In elementary, middle school, and high school I seemed to get myself into some not-so-great friendships. Those friends weren’t reckless or evil, they didn’t encourage me to shoot up heroine or drink alcohol before first period or anything. They weren’t those kinds of bad friends. They were the kind of friends who got close with me and throughout our friendship, they found out my what my weaknesses are and used that to their advantage. Sometimes, they were very discrete about the way they treated me, so not many other people really noticed. Don’t get me wrong though, they aren’t bad people, they’re pretty great actually. I wouldn’t become friends with someone who was mean to me right off the bat. Although they were good people, they weren’t good for me. Part of my own personality is that I have a difficult time sharing my opinion or what’s on my mind (which I have recently found out is partially a result of those friendships). So that in combination with these friends meant they ended up walking all over me without even knowing it. I know it’s partially my fault for not really voicing my problems with the relationships, but there’s no going back now and I can’t really change anything about friendships that are now over. What I can do, though, is forgive all the friends who hurt me. I can forgive them for making me feel stupid, worthless, voiceless, etc. Also, I can forgive myself for not doing what I could to try to either strengthen the friendship or end it in a mature way. I beat myself up a lot about the fact that I could have done a whole lot more than I did to fix the friendship and not end up getting as hurt as I did or hurting them.
I didn’t actually know how much those friendships had affected me to this day until I did soul care with one of my squad leaders, Casey. Casey stayed with our team for a little over a week, which was wonderful. One day, she did soul care with me, which is basically a conversation with God that is assisted by someone else. So what would happen is Casey (the one assisting) would pray for me and the soul care, then she would listen to God and He would tell Casey something I should ask Him, then she would tell me something to ask Him, I would ask Him, listen, and then voice what I heard (you can also google soul care to learn more about it, I just would have gone on and on about it if I wasn’t trying to talk about forgiveness in this blog). Anyway, during my soul care with her, God conveniently brought up a lot of the hurt and wounds that I have as a result of the bad friendships. I am the way that I am today because of them. Again, I am not saying that those friends are terrible people, they just weren’t very good for me. I learned some great things from them but I was also hurt a lot from them. I have learned that when you forgive someone, it doesn’t mean they still need to be a present being in your life. They don’t need to still be your friend, you don’t need to have weekly coffee dates with them, you don’t even need to talk to them (although it might be helpful in certain situations to do so), forgiving is giving the pain to God, that’s all.
Forgiving others is hard enough but forgiving yourself is even harder. I don’t know why that is but it really is true. I have a lot of people in my life that I need to forgive and am working on forgiving them. Forgiving myself is a whole different journey. I think it is because I don’t want to admit that I have hurt myself. We get so used to being unkind and unforgiving towards ourselves without even knowing it and we don’t want to accept the fact that we need forgiveness just as much as others do. As a matter of fact, if I need to forgive someone else, chances are they need to forgive themselves too. Forgiveness is such a weird concept because it is just not talked about much, at least it wasn’t talked about in much depth as I was growing up. Growing up, I was taught that forgiveness is an important part of life but I wasn’t really taught how o actually forgive. There’s letting things go and brushing things under the rug but that’t not forgiveness, that’s ignoring. I think that growing up, I got ignoring and forgiveness mixed up. I can easily let things go and accept the fact that someone hurt me and not to dwell on it, that is an important think to learn. Ignoring the hurt that you have caused yourself is a lot easier than forgiving yourself. I still haven’t quite figured out why it’s so much more difficult to be kind and forgiving towards myself than it is to be kind and forgiving towards other people, but I have noticed that it is. So, yes, I do forgive, the title of this blog is really just to draw you in, I just haven’t fully forgiven myself or people who have been in my life but I’m on the journey towards full forgiveness with Jesus by my side coaching me along the way.
With all of this said, I encourage you all to think about forgiveness in a different light. Forgiving is not ignoring and forgetting, but still feeling the pain. Forgiving is handing off the pain to God. He can handle it, you can’t. You cannot feel completely free until you figure out how to forgive and do it, I have found this to be a fact. I encourage you all to really sit in this and figure out what forgiveness means for you. Do you need to forgive your dad for leaving your family? Do you need to forgive your boyfriend/girlfriend for cheating on you? Do you need to forgive your friend for betraying you? Do you need to forgive yourself for being unkind and unloving towards you? Figure out what it means for you and start to take the steps towards forgiveness, I promise you wont regret it.
