Forgiveness
Forgiveness.
I thought I knew.
Maybe I was convincing myself. But amidst trauma lurked a dirty secret that kept me sick on the inside and confused why my peace would leave so fast. It is called unforgiveness friends and it is a silent killer as described in this mental and physical health study.
I am by no means a professional forgiver (is there such a thing?), yet I am learning that God has to show you the way. If you are like me and had trauma occur in your past, their could be a possibility this linked your soul with a bitterness for anyone that hurts you—in any way. A sad bitterness that only makes the enemy of this world happy.
When I learned that trauma wasn’t rational, I began to see how forgiveness was for myself. Shocker, not the other person. I think a lot of people have heard that phrase “taking the poison pill and expecting the other person to die?” Yeah that was me. Over and over again. Daily? Sure. Multiple times a day? Yup. Storing up factoids of hurts which reaped a bitter poison in my soul. You bet.
Forgiveness is for our personal healing, not theirs.
The Lord was so gracious to reveal to me how deep the unforgivness had gotten and provide me a way out. The Lord saves and heals from the inside out. I am a walking testimony of that. With each forgiveness spoken I feel the cancerous cells of bitterness and death being removed from my body. The nasty dark black web of these cells that has robbed me of joy and peace on too many occasions. Why did this happen? Because I had held on to hurt people either intended or didn’t intend at all.
What I am learning is it doesn’t matter the intention. I forgive. I practice the way to forgive that God has shown me and breathe. Each time more and more healing occurs. The sick cells leave my body and I become more and more whole and cleansed the way God intended it.
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. —Matthew 6:14-15
Just like life is not black and white, forgiveness is not either. Particular people and situations can wound in ways that don’t make sense because of a persons predisposition to trauma, past, and childhood.
I still find myself triggered in certain family and friend situations given those past hurts. Like the Bible talks about, I have to rely on community (e.g., my husband and a couple friends in the middle of a pandemic) to help show me the situation perhaps through their eyes—or the individuals themselves. My colored glasses do not look like another’s and vise versa.
Coincidentally, I just began reading “Suffering is Never for Nothing” by a missionary Elisabeth Elliot and it is opening my eyes to smaller scale suffering. Elliot defines suffering as anything you want but do not have.
You didn’t wait for me, when everybody else would have walked away—love moved first. —Casting Crowns
Our ever faithful, always loving God is shepherding us on this journey called life. Yes, it is messy. Some days more than others. But if we breathe and forgive we allow Jesus to do the healing and fight the battles for us.
I pray the journey you are on leads you further toward Christ.
What a friend we have in Jesus… oh what peace we often forfeit, Oh what needless pain we bear. When we do not carry, everything to God in prayer.
—Hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
May we all have the peaceful expression like sheep of Jesus as he Shepards us through life and ultimately to our eternal home.
