Kethuvim

I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness, mainly how much I suck at it sometimes. The Church should be full of the most forgiving people on the planet, and, unfortunately, it seems to be the opposite in a lot of respects. The thing about forgiving other people is that, when we refuse to forgive someone, it doesn't hurt the other person, it hurts us. Forgiveness (in a manner of speaking) is a completely selfish act. It has to be, because forgiveness is more about us than it is about the person who wronged us. When we refuse to forgive, we become bitter, which ultimately leads to our destruction.

Writer Anne Lamott puts it this way, "In fact, not forgiving is like drinking rat poision and then waiting for the rat to die." I think that says it all. If someone wrongs me, it isn't the other person that suffers, it is I who suffers when bitterness eats my lunch. So who has wronged you? We all have wounds, and unless we clean them out by forgiving the person who wounded us, we'll become infected by it and ultimately die from the poison.