Please help me get organized with my forgiving. I have to forgive my father, my sister, my current boss, and even some kids who bullied me when I was a teenager. Where do I begin?
In my book, The Forgiving Life, I discuss The Forgiveness Landscape. I ask people to make an inventory of all people, across the forgiver’s life, who have hurt the forgiver. Then the forgiver rates the degree of current hurt and anger toward each of these persons on a 1 to 10 scale. The forgiver then places the people in order from the ones who have given the least hurt and produced the least amount of anger (in the forgiver) all the way up to the one who makes the forgiver the most hurt and angry at the present time. Start at the bottom and forgive people there because they likely are easier to forgive. As you build your forgiveness muscles, as you move up the hierarchy of anger and hurt, you then are more ready to forgive those who have given you the biggest hurts and the deepest anger.
