Four Hundred and Ninety
Forgiveness. A hard topic, but it’s one that I love so much. You see, sometimes we get hurt and our pride does funny this thing where it becomes bigger than it needs to be and gets in the way of things, like our ability to forgive. What we don’t realize is that we’re letting a situation take over instead of allowing life to move on, so we’re living in our past instead of the present. It’s a powerful thing. I used to think that I forgave people pretty easily. Someone would apologize and I would say it’s okay, but still hold grudges towards them. And if they did something to me again, I’d remember the last thing they did and add it to the current situation. But I learned that’s not love and it’s not really forgiveness either.
In 1 Corinthians 13:5 it tells us that, “[Love] keeps no record of being wronged.” This means, out of love, we need to get in the process of letting past hurts go. It’s not an easy task, but I’ve come to know that the end result is edifying. Peter asked Jesus how many times we should forgive someone who has sinned against us and suggested seven times. Jesus replied not just seven times, but seventy times seven (Matthew 18:21-22) . It’s important to understand that Jesus is telling us that forgiveness doesn’t happen just one time, but multiple times. We need to forgive the person that wronged us every time we see them. We need to forgive until our hurt is no longer felt because⎯if you haven’t noticed⎯it’s hard to love when we still have hurt in our hearts.
And what if someone has wronged us and did not apologize? We still need to forgive them anyways. If we don’t do this, then we begin to harbor hurt in our hearts. We owe it to ourselves to, again, let the hurt go so we can love with our whole hearts. The Bible also tells us it’s important to forgive, so that God may forgive us of what we have done (Mark 11:25).
If you want to be more Christlike this year, I challenge you to love because you were first loved and to forgive because you have been forgiven.
Much love,
Kumam 💞