Learning to Forgive - Part 1

By Megan Danquah

Ever wonder about WHAT it means to forgive and HOW to actually forgive? In a two-part post “series” I would like to take some time here to “de-mystify” the process. 

In my experience, forgiveness always felt elusive. I knew that it was the right thing to do, but I never understood how. In one sense, I understood it was a matter of my will—a matter of forcing my emotions and pain to bow to my will to say that it is ok, what happened didn’t matter, that if I just put on the love of Christ, all will be well and I will be able to forget about what grievance I experienced at the hand of another person. In another sense, I understood it to be some sort of miraculous exchange of my hurt for the love of Christ for whomever it was who had wounded me. Both understandings left me spending copious amounts of time “praying” - which was really just time spent trying to achieve mind over matter, repeating a mantra in my mind similar to “These feelings of pain can’t rule me anymore, these feelings of pain can’t rule me anymore”.  

The other thing I believed about forgiveness was that the faster it was achieved, the better. I believed that the more quickly I was able to achieve this “mind-over-matter” state, the happier the Lord would be with me. I believed that God wanted me to get rid of my unforgiveness as quickly as possible. Because of this I feel like I spent much of my life attempting to stuff all these wounds - from childhood into adulthood - because, for me, mind-over-matter was unfortunately unachievable. No matter how hard I white-knuckled it, nothing was changing. The pain was still there. All I was accomplishing was becoming a master at living in a perpetual state of denial.

Then something happened to me. I will not go into detail, but it is enough to know that I was deeply betrayed by someone extremely close to me. Betrayed in a way that my whole world and all I knew, along with all the devices I had used to cope with the pain in my life, were destroyed, and not by my own choosing. Here are a few things that I lost as a result: friends, my home, my job. Not to mention some of the emotional things I had lost: trust, a sense of belonging, a sense of justice, a sense of pure love, and all sense of the false security that I had carefully used to protect my heart my whole life. 

So here I was. Faced with forgiveness on a whole different level. A level one-hundred times deeper than any I had faced before. Praise God that He knows us intimately, and He knows exactly what, and WHO we need in our life to help us through when crisis occurs. He did that for me, and here’re a few things I have come to understand about forgiveness:

1. Forgiveness is a process, not a one-off spiritual transaction. We don't need to make it a race to the finish line. I believe it is important to start the process, but not to rush through it. There are so many things to learn about myself and God and others through the process of forgiveness. I do not want to lose that opportunity because of my wrong thinking that God wants this over with as soon as possible, or because I want this over with as soon as possible. It’s hard to sit in our pain, isn’t it? But it is through that very act that healing comes. 

2. Forgiveness is a lot more practical than I ever thought. There are actual steps that I can take, with actual exercises and practices that I can adopt, that will walk me through to a place where I am ready to move forward in my life. (More about that in Part 2). 

3. Forgiveness really has nothing to do with saying the words “I forgive you.” I used that for years in order to feel like I had really done it. Somehow those three words were supposed to equal spiritual and emotional proof that the elusive and miraculous “transaction” of forgiveness had taken place. Forgiveness is a very individual, inner and private process. Only you can know what it is like to live with the pain you have and know the hard work you have achieved to reach a place where you have forgiven.

 

4. Forgiveness requires work. Hard work. BUT it is some of the most valuable work I have ever done for myself. The old saying is true: Forgiveness is about letting someone out of prison, only to discover that the someone was you. The brilliant thing is that it really is for me! It is one of the best things I have undertaken to show love and compassion to myself.  I saw a strength in me that I never knew that I had!!!  

Next month, I will share further some specific steps that you can take to walk through the forgiveness process.

What have you believed to be true about forgiveness and did it hinder the forgiveness process for you?