Day Twenty-One

Day Twenty–One // March 12 // Forgiveness

“Forgiveness is the final form of love.” – Reinhold Niebuhr –

To live in faithful, God-honoring, Gospel-proclaiming relationships, we must learn to forgive. It is, perhaps, one of the most vexing disciplines for the Christian to achieve: forgiveness. In fact, forgiving a wrong done to us is sometimes more painful than the wrong, itself. And what we’ve experienced to be true is that it’s sometimes easier to forgive our enemies than it is to forgive our friends. It’s easier to forgive those at our fists than it is those by our side – those who should know better, those who should know us better. But life gets in the way.

We hold onto those secret hurts. We cling to our hidden pains. We nurse them and pamper them. Instead

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of lancing the blister that has grown atop our weary souls, we coddle it. We feed the grudge. We let it dictate our attitude. And, in the end, we let it control our life.

This is not the way of faith. This is not the way of Christ – who was rejected by even those who’d served by His side. This is the way of the world – lost, pining, sinking. And it thwarts the victory we’re invited to know in Jesus Christ. It’s been said a thousand times: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free only to discover that the prisoner was you.” We don’t forgive for the sake of the other; we forgive for the sake of ourselves. It is, truly, one of the most blessedly selfish things that we can do. But we can’t do it on our own. We don’t have the power (nor, honestly, the willingness) to forgive those who have hurt us – especially those who’ve walked by our side.

We can only forgive to the extent that we acknowledge that we’ve been forgiven, ourselves. It requires the courage of a totally surrendered life and the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to move beyond what has, for years, held us back. Only God can move us onward. Only God can move us upward. Only God can heal the wounded side of those who’ve been betrayed.