Wrestling With Forgiveness

Forgiveness is hard.  It is especially hard when it calls for us to forgive people that left deep wounds on our heart.  Wounds that may still be so very raw.

These past four years have challenged me to dig deeper into the practice of forgiving. What I noticed was that as I was walking through the layers of hurt and forgiveness, I began to try to find logical reasons of justification for the actions of the people who hurt me.  My heart and my head just could not take the intense pain of the reality that people I loved immensely would destroy our relationship and in the process shatter my heart for personal gain and self centered motivation.

I wrestled with God over releasing these relationships. I wrestled with my heart and tried to find any and all justification for their behavior. 

What God has taught me through this season is that I do not have to find reasons of justification for the actions of people that hurt me. I am not always called to reconcile those relationships but I am called to forgive.

In hindsight, I can see where God was removing these people for my protection.  Protection from the things that live in the dark recesses of their hearts.  God began to show me over and over again patterns of behavior in these people that should have been a glaring beacon of warning for what was to come.  What He knew about me was that I would continue to throw down the door stopper every time he tried to remove them if their hearts were not revealed in a way that I couldn’t justify their behavior anymore.

Forgiveness does not excuse the behavior of those that have wounded us.  Forgiveness releases control back to God allowing him to bring about justice. It also releases untold blessings on our own life when we choose to forgive and allows God to fill the space of hurt with immeasurably more than we could ever ask for.

Friends, I am not minimizing the hurt you may be walking through. I am not justifying or excusing the behaviors of the person that hurt you.  I just want to remind you that God calls us to forgive just as He has forgiven us.  His ways are higher. Revenge is His alone.  Releasing those that hurt us through forgiveness releases them to God so that He can make things right.

Releasing those that hurt us through forgiveness opens the doors for Gods blessings on our life and makes us whole again. We regain control of who we are and whose we are.  Forgiveness means those that came to kill, steal and destroy no longer have the power to do so in your life.

Much Love,

Chrissy