This Twisty Journey You Are On: A Helpful Forgiveness Hint
This journey we call forgiveness is not a straight path to the end with joy awaiting you. Instead, if you are like the rest of us, you will start and stop and start again a number of times before you arrive, safe, at the journey’s end. You will be making great progress and then have a dream about the person and wake up angry all over again. You will think you have conquered only to meet again the person who hurts you, and there is the anger. Or, it is a special holiday and you reflect back on your life hoping for peace and instead get a piece of the person’s own anger, and once again you are angry. The forgiveness path is like this and so please be gentle with yourself. Just start again with this person by examining the nature of your wounds now, assess what kind of work you need to do (more love? more merciful restraint?) and continue.
Robert
I actually am relieved to hear this. When I sometimes get mad I say to myself that I have not forgiven. It is nice to see that others have this go-back-and-forward again issue. It helps with perseverance and confidence in completing the forgiveness journey as you call it.
To me the forgiveness path keeps me humble. Just when i think I have forgiven someone I find out that I have not. Then I start again but I do find that it gets easier each time I begin again. I say that to encourage others who want to try it.
When people say that forgiveness is for weaklings, I will show them this post. It takes grit and determination to walk a path like this. To keep at it when anger returns is a hard task and shows great courage.
It can be so difficult to be gentle with myself when I am forgiving. I want to rush to the end and be done with it. And yet it does take time and it does require my patience. And so this I will remember.
There is one person I know who was able to forgive straightaway. I do not know if this was rare for her but it surely is rare for me and what I see when I look around at other people. Most of us have to be a lot more patient than that.