Forgiveness

I just had an interesting conversation about forgiveness. It's funny how we want people to always forgive us, but do we forgive people as easily as we expect them to forgive us? Sometimes we are able to forgive the situation, but not the person. Why is it that we hold on to grudges for so long and find it easy to forgive one person and not another? Do we have criteria for forgiving people? Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins. This man died so that we may have eternal life with God, and yet we can't forgive someone for something they may have done.

To God there is only one thing that is unforgivable that is blasphemy, if we deny Him. But to us as humans we find so many things unforgivable. I know a woman who forgave her boyfriend for cheating on her. How many of us can say we can forgive a spouse for cheating? I know women, myself included, who have forgiven men who raped us. Something so big as that, we can find it in us to forgive and that yes gives us more strength than we can imagine. Forgiving doesn't always lead to forgetting, but it leads to healing. God wants us to forgive as He forgave us, that means we need to sacrifice something like our own self pride to simply say "I forgive you." But simply because we forgive something doesn't mean we say it's o-kay.

Often times we can forgive a situation, but not the person, but why is that. Why can some people forgive the situation of lying, cheating, stealing, choosing the wrong path, but not the other person? Why can't we let go of things? We would be so much better if we forgive and let go. We would be able to focus more of our attention on more important things like our faith, walk, and service to God. Holding a grudge can hinder our relationship with God and really who wants that? I sure don't.

In my last post I mentioned the innocence of Children and God saying we need to be like them. Think back to childhood did we hold grudges then? NO. A simple "I'm sorry" worked and we forgave and were the best of friends again (remember how everyone was our best friend?) Anyway. We need to work more on forgiving people and healing our hurts and focusing that energy on God and our service to Him. Who knows if we forgive more, there would be less hate in the world. But after all we're only human so could something like total forgiveness of everything exist? Maybe...maybe not.