Forgive and Forgive

            A couple weeks ago, I had a follow-up appointment with my nutritional/chiropractic doctor.  The last couple of visits he has done something called “Neuro Emotional Technique” with me.  It has felt a little like counseling because we’ve talked about some stressful and traumatic experiences from the past, though not extensively.  Then, he has done various adjustments to get my body “un-stuck” from fight or flight positions in relation to those different experiences.  At the end of this last appointment, I was pretty shaken up again by some of the things we talked about.  After the adjustments, the doctor encouraged me to seek to forgive (he is a believer, by the way). 

The thing is, I thought I had already forgiven.  I had told this person that I forgave them, and I meant it when I said it.  The problem is that, no matter how hard I try, I cannot completely forget.  Painful memories have a way of searing themselves into our minds.  Sure, the sting of them might lessen over time.  However, sometimes a word, a face, a place, a smell, or a song can make it all come flooding back.  Not only that, but I have to admit that I sometimes allow anger and blame to break through again.    

On the drive home from my appointment, I tried to sort all of this out in my mind.  If I still feel pain, does that mean I haven’t truly forgiven?  If I still get angry, does that mean I never really forgave this person in the first place?  Some people take decades before they are willing to extend forgiveness to those who hurt them – for something that is so hard and takes so long, shouldn’t it be a once-and-for-all type of deal?  Forgive and forget: isn’t that the saying?  How can I ever truly forgive if it requires the impossible – blotting out part of my life from my memory?

When I ask these types of questions, verses and the words of different mentors and teachers usually fill in the gaps pretty quickly.  Deep down, I knew that choosing forgiveness does not bring instant or permanent healing to the wounds that were dealt, and I knew that God doesn’t expect us to forget our pain like it never happened.  Extending forgiveness gives us the freedom we need to heal and continue to move forward without collapsing in on ourselves.

What I hadn’t fully realized before is that forgiveness can be a little like doing laundry.  It’s not something that one can necessarily do just once and be done with it forever (which would be far easier on both counts, I might add).  I’m not talking here about forgiving one person multiple times for different wrongs.  Some hurts go so deep and are so present (e.g., dealt by a parent, a sibling, a spouse, or a child), that we can’t reach the point of forgiveness for that single act just once and expect never to have to deal with it again.  1 Corinthians 13:5 explains that love keeps no record of wrongs.  Since we can’t give ourselves lobotomies to completely rid ourselves of the memories, what does this aspect of love look like? 

I can tell you what it has looked like for me:

• Refusing to nurse old wounds by dwelling on them.  This is the closest we can come to “forgetting.”  We can’t help when we run into a painful reminder, but we do have control over how we respond and whether or not we cling to that trigger.  One of my former teachers described this principle by saying that we can’t help it if a bird flies over our head, but we don’t have to let it make a nest in our hair.

• Choosing not to pull up old hurts to defend myself against new ones.  This is a huge one for marriage.  It is so easy when our spouse hurts us to pull up a list of everything he or she has done wrong in the past, if not verbally then mentally.  In that moment, we have to once again choose to forgive those past wrongs.

• Refusing to allow my anger over the sin to morph back into anger toward the individual.  This is a fine line to walk.  Again, this is much harder to avoid the longer we allow ourselves to simmer in the past. 

            Forgiveness isn’t easy.  It doesn’t come naturally, and it’s not something that we can do just once.  It is a continual, active choice not to hold a person’s sins against them.  Why would anyone in their right mind do this, especially in the victim-glorifying culture that we live in?  We forgive because we have been forgiven.

            Did you know that Jesus stands as our advocate before the Father in heaven?  Our accuser, Satan, is constantly bringing up charges against us to God the Father.  We give him plenty of incriminating evidence to use.  Even so, Jesus counters with scarred hands and feet as eternal proof that our sentence has already been served.  He knows that we still fail Him, and He has already felt the weight of all of the sin we will ever commit.  Yet, He still forgives us, and He still forgives those who have hurt us. 

            We can’t forgive and forget, but we can forgive and forgive.  Keep forgiving because He has forgiven and will never stop forgiving you.