Forgiveness

I never thought I had a problem with forgiveness, but now that I think back upon it I realize that I haven't been as forgiving as I've always believed. Forgiveness was a hard lesson for me, like it is for many people. I'm a trusting person I easily believe and trust in people always finding the good in them. This is a quality that I love about myself, but it also means that I'm prone to get hurt. And no matter what a person did to hurt me, no matter how much they broke me down I was always there for them in their time of need. I always thought that was the equivalent of forgiveness. I would tell the person that I forgave them and I would be there when they needed me. But the truth was I never forgave them. In the short run, yes I forgave them. I set their transgressions aside. But in the long run I carried that hurt with me. I would bring it up at times to rant about, to bring myself down ((as pathetic as that sounds)), or to remind myself of the past so I don't make the same mistakes. But that isn't forgiveness. Forgiveness it letting it go, once and for all. That sounds a lot more simple than it actually is.

When someone hurts you deeply you never forget it. We are humans, we have flaws in our character and that's one of them. Most of the time you don't forget those deep scars because that is something that shaped you into the person you are today. True forgiveness takes time with those deep emotional scars. You can tell that person you forgive them but it's not going to be till years later that you'll reach true forgiveness.

I define true forgiveness by letting it go. What I mean by that is you forgive the person, whether you tell them or not is up to you. The real aspect of forgiveness is you cannot bring up the injustice towards you in negative ways. You cannot bring up that emotional scar to be angry about or to make yourself feel bad. If you're bringing up that situation then you haven't truly forgiven that person because you still have negative feelings that will eat you from the inside out. You know you have reached forgiveness when you can look back on the event as something that made you stronger, and make something positive out of what happened.

I'm not saying that this is easy, it's not. Forgiveness is something I struggle with all the time. A lot of things that happened to me took years to heal. All the hurt from elementary school and middle school I can finally look back on and feel no negative or angry feelings and I can finally say those events made me stronger. It took me 4+ years to finally be able to say that and truly mean it.

The thing that inspired me to write this post was my issue with the church and religion. If you read my blog entry called churches,whistles,and cancellations, you'll see some of the things the church had done to me. Obviously you can tell I haven't truly forgiven the church and religion for the ways they hurt me. But I'm working on forgiving them. And I need to stop bringing up what happened to me so I can use that as a reason to be mad at religion, my family, the church I go to. It's hard, it's extremely hard, but harboring those feelings only started to eat away at me from the inside, and not in a good way. It's not going to be an easy journey, I know that, the pain is still fresh and the wound is just healing. But hopefully I'll be able to stitch up that wound and hurry the process along by forcing myself not to bring up what happened in negative ways. I hope that reading this entry has made you think of something that you need to forgive, and hopefully helps you in some sort of way.

"True forgiveness is not an action after the fact, it is an attitude with which you enter each moment." - David Ridge