A story of hurt and forgiveness

Last October I wrote a post about forgiveness, talking about my revelation that you have to be willing to BLAME before you can truly forgive (as opposed to downplaying the wrong, which is what I often do). Many of you really responded to that post, and I vowed to write another post about forgiveness. Apparently, just like I had a hard time making myself sit down and right that first post, the second one wasn't coming easily, either.

But last Sunday our pastor (we have 2 at my church, my husband and this other fellow) preached about forgiveness. Which sort of lit the fire under my seat again. You will still notice that it took me 5 days to write the post. Why do I resist it? I don't know.

Anyhow...

One of the key points in his sermon is that forgiving is giving up the right to tell the story. You've surely heard this point before. If you've read any magazine article or book about fighting fair, you've heard this in terms of not bringing up past grievances. Deal only with the situation at hand. It also applies to telling the story to others. Have I really forgiven someone if I go around telling everyone about the awful thing they did? The "not telling the story" thing doesn't mean it can't EVER come up... sometimes you need to talk about it to share your healing, or move past a certain thing, and I think that if the incident is a pattern, sometimes you need to bring that into focus. But we give up the right to bring up the story to make the other person feel guilty, or to gain us sympathy and a feeling of righteousness.

I'd heard the pastor talk about this before, and felt like I was doing pretty well in this department.

My smugness, of course, was followed by a revelation.

Like many of you, I have lots of incidences where I am called upon to forgive. Most of them come and go fairly quickly, and I'm able to apply all these things I've learned about forgiveness. But I have one that is my sticking point. The one I keep coming back to. And that's where this point hit home. Because even though I don't bring up the story to the people who hurt me, and I don't tell others about it, I tell myself about it all the time. It comes up in my own little brain. In the blackest parts of my heart. I cannot expect myself to forget it. That is asking myself the impossible. But I need to stop telling myself the story. I need to stop feeding it. I need to stop holding on to it. I need to stop relishing in all the little horrible details. I need to stop justifying my years old indignation. I need to stop feeling guilty about it when I do think of it.

When my brain brings it to mind, I need to remember the choice I made to forgive. AND STOP RIGHT THERE. Because telling myself the story again and again in my head? It's the perfect example of another thing my pastor said: "Not forgiving is like taking poison and expecting the other person to die." I get angry all over again. I reexamine the evidence. AND THEN I remind myself that I've made the choice to forgive, and feel guilty that I keep thinking about it. I need to cut out all the stuff in the middle (and that last guilty bit at the end). It comes up? I remind myself of my forgiveness, and then I move on. I know the story. It hasn't changed. Skip the middle and go right to its proper ending:

Forgiveness.