Forgiveness

“We cannot change our past. We cannot change the fact that people act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.” –Charles R. Swindoll

When someone hurts you, it is really easy to believe that you are the only person in the world that has ever been hurt this badly. Yes, you may feel like it is the end of the world. Yes, you may have to pick yourself up off the floor a couple times, and you may cry for hours at a time. You may feel like hurting this person will make you feel better, that this revenge will somehow heal your hurt and give you peace. Wrong. Nothing that you do will change the fact that something happened. You can't turn back time, and you can't erase the past..no matter how bad you want to. 

I speak from experience, since I held one of the world's biggest grudges for about a year. It took me this long to realize that I'd been expecting people to forgive me all of my life, and I'd forgiven so many other people...so why not the people that hurt me the most? It was high time I realized that everyone makes mistakes. I may have been hurting, but I wasn't the only one. So, finally, after almost a year, we buried the hatchet. :)

I couldn't be happier. There is something so fulfilling about settling old scores, about letting go of something that has caused you so much pain, about reviving old friendships. All of you who know me know all of the deeper information in the story, but I am so thankful that God gave me the courage and the strength to forgive and to regain an old friend in the process. I've known for awhile now that God was trying to tell me something. Something was missing and something needed to be fixed. Finally, I realized what He had been laying on my heart all along. He had taken extraordinary, unimaginable, incomparable measures to make sure that I am forgiven, so why wasn't I willing to forgive? It was totally worth it, and I'm really enjoying making up for lost time with an old friend.

"And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins." Mark 11:25