Toward Forgiveness

When I examine myself carefully, I find that I am not a very forgiving person though I could easily pass for one. I may seem like a forgiving person, perhaps to others and often in my own eyes, but when faced with some deep hurt or something that truly offends me, I have great difficulty forgiving. The reason I tell myself that I am a forgiving person is that I easily let go of the “forgivable”.

By “forgivable” things I mean what others do or say over which we could take offense, but do not. For whatever reason, we view these as smaller slights and not major injuries. Maybe we speak to the person quickly and discover a misunderstanding and the issue never becomes a source of resentment for us. Perhaps we give them the benefit of the doubt, assume they did not intend to be hurtful, or conclude they were having a bad day. Thus we temper our thinking about what happened, keeping us from taking such potentially hurtful actions or words personally. Letting forgivable matters go is good but we never really saw these actions as unforgivable.

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8

Forgiveness is letting go of the unforgivable. These offenses are when we remain convinced that we were deliberately mistreated no matter how hard we try to think they did not mean it and we ought to let it go. The events remain in our thoughts and the memories continue to hurt. There are no extenuating circumstances. We were sinned against and we believe that we have every right to be angry, hurt, and bitter. Now we are dealing with what is unforgivable to us, and forgiving these is truly difficult.

Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Colossians 3:13

The question is how to move toward this God-like forgiveness when we have experienced what we consider unforgivable. A good beginning place is to examine what is happening internally within us, the reason we view some actions as forgivable and others as unforgivable. Perhaps a simple example can help us think about this.

Let’s assume that when others are not punctual it irks us to no end, but if someone is forgetful we let it go. Both are relatively small matters, but one seems inexcusable and the other forgivable. I think the difference between our two different reactions involves pride. If I pride myself on always being on time, I will likely consider it a greater offense and extremely rude for someone to be late. They are not valuing my time. My time is important and they do not respect me, as apparent by their lateness. However, if I myself am late at times, their tardiness is easily forgivable.

Their actions become unforgivable because of my pride both in being punctual and in the value I place on my time. Forgetfulness may seem like a personal quirk that I easily “forgive”. I will also likely conclude that timeliness is something they could manage if they really wanted to, but may think that forgetfulness is not as much their fault. So I let go of their absent mindedness, but continue to hold against them their chronic lateness. Because we can easily take pride in what we do well, these are the very areas in which the failures of others often seem unforgivable. Polite and courteous people may find rudeness unforgivable. Loyal individuals have trouble forgiving disloyalty, the generous, miserliness, the religious, sacrilegious behavior, and so on.

If I am correct, then when I am unforgiving I need to examine where pride, a deadly mindset, is fueling my difficulty in forgiving. Thoughts like ‘how dare they’, ‘I deserve better’, and ‘what they did or said was wrong’, when repeated endlessly in our heads, keep us from forgiving. It may be true what they did was wrong and we do deserve better, but forgiveness is not about whether what happened was right but whether we will forgive the unforgivable wrongs we suffer. Eventually, we want to move more things from the unforgivable category of what we cannot get over, to forgivable matters. Addressing our pride will likely help.

Forgiveness can become the gift that we give without even thinking. We may, with grace and inner work, not think of ourselves as forgiving people because the offenses of others have ceased to be major matters we wrestle to forgive, and are simply overlooked in love. We may become so forgiving that we do not think of ourselves as forgiving.