When we forgive, we set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner we set free is us.

The first person to benefit from forgiving is the one who does it.

We do our forgiving alone inside our hearts and minds; what happens to the people we forgive depends on them.

We must forgive because God forgives us.

Jesus modeled this kind of love as he hung from the cross and cried out, “Father, forgive them…”

Forgiveness opens the door for personal growth.

As long as we’re focused on the part the other one played in our unhappiness, the longer we delay taking responsibility for our part. The sooner we forgive, the sooner we take responsibility for our own part.

So there is no avoiding Jesus’ words on the Mount:

Matthew 5:43-48

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. 46 If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

But, HOW Can we Forgive?

Lew Smedes wrote two awesome books on forgiveness:

Forgive and Forget and The Art of Forgiveness.

Smedes writes that Forgiving happens in three stages:

“We rediscover the humanity of the person who wronged us,

we surrender our right to get even,

and we wish that person well.” – Jesus – “Pray for those…”

Stage 1 – We rediscover the humanity of the person who wronged us.

We often discover that the person who hurt us is someone who was hurt themselves. Hurt people hurt people.

We tend to demonize the person who hurt us.

Lew Smedes in The Art of Forgiving, pp. 6-11

I have heard that 80 percent of what we see lies behind our eyes. If this is so, 80 percent of what we see when we look at a person who recently wronged and deeply wounded us must lie behind our eyes in the memory of our pain. We filter the image of our villain through the gauze of our wounded memories, and in the process we alter his reality.

We shrink him to the size of what he did to us; he becomes the wrong he did. “He is no more than an animal.” “He is nothing but a cheat.”

As we start on the miracle of forgiving, we begin to see our enemy through a cleaner lens, less smudged by hate. We begin to see a real person, a botched self, no doubt, a hodgepodge of meanness and decency, lies and truths, good and evil that not even the shadows of his soul can wholly hide. …we see a human being created to be a child of God.

Forgiving our enemy does not turn him into a close friend or a promising husband or a trustworthy partner. We do not diminish the wrongness of what he did to us…but we take him back into our private world as a person who shares our faulty humanity…still thoroughly blamable for what he did to us. Yet, human like us.

My father was critical and abusive when I was growing up. He was often angry with me, pointing out my faults and punishing me. I was scared of him. I felt that I could never please him and as I entered my late-teens and twenties I felt angry towards him for that. I fought with him and put him down. Mostly I stayed away.

The odd thing is – while I was hating my father for not fully accepting me, I was still trying to earn his favor.

I was projecting my father relationship on to my God relationship. I felt that God could never be pleased with me, that my sins were not truly forgiven, that grace was not for me. And if I was honest, I was angry at God for accepting some, but not accepting me.

When I was in my twenties, I could begin to see who he really was. I spent some time with my grandmother, his mother, and I heard how she talked about my father in critical ways. In her view, he had failed to do well in school. He was off hunting and trapping, when he should have been studying. She wasn’t real fond of my mother. And she was especially critical of my father’s faith in God and how he pursued God and God’s will in a way that she called fanatical. He was a fanatic, she said.

I began to feel sorry for my dad. It dawned on me that his mother did not fully accept her son.

I began to see my father, not as an all-powerful man whose every word and action were carefully chosen from his free will, but an injured and wounded little boy who often responded instinctively – the only way he knew. Sometimes a pathetic creature who had been injured worse than me.

For me, it was the start of forgiving my father for the ways he had hurt me. I had demonized my father – made him more powerful than he really was. I had to see him as human, like me.

Stage 2 – We surrender our right to get even.

Smedes:
Homer was smacking his lips when he drooled about revenge. It tastes so sweet, he said, we swirl it around on our tongues and let it drip like honey down our chins.

As we move along…on the path of forgiving, we hold the right to vengeance in our two hands, take one last longing look at it, and let it spill to the ground like a handful of water. With good riddance.

With my father, when I saw how he had been injured, I thought, what good would it do anybody to injure him more? I did not want to be the kind of person who piles on a person when he’s down, who joins in with bullies to pound on a defenseless child. I didn’t want to be that person.

When we focus on those who have hurt us – we take a posture of always looking back. We’re obsessed with the past – a past that we cannot change.

I like to ride my mountain bike – off-road when I can, but mostly on the street. I get nervous about cars whizzing by from behind me, so I got a stick-on mirror for my bike helmet. Rearview mirror. It’s hard to get it in the right place. One time when riding with my kids, I was adjusting the mirror, I ran into a parked car – almost. My son yelled and I pulled around it just in time.

That’s what we do when we can’t let go of fantasies or plans of vengeance towards those who hurt us sometime in the past. We jeopardize our future.

When we give up on vengeance, we are not giving up on justice.

Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secured when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction.
Vengeance is personal satisfaction. Justice is moral accounting.

Stage 3 – We wish that person well – that’s love.

We come to love our enemy. We pray for those who have mistreated us.

Once we have rediscovered our offender’s humanity and given up our right to enjoy getting even, we begin to feel new feelings toward him personally. We feel him differently after we see him differently.

What we felt before was simple hate…Whether passive or aggressive, our hurt left us calling heaven to make bad things happen to the bad person who did bad things to us. That is what hate is.

When we begin to forgive, however, we feel a real though perhaps reluctant wish that some good things might come the weasel’s way.

…The feeling of good will is likely to be weak and hesitant at the start, and we are almost bound to backslide into malice along the way. But if we feel any stirrings of benevolence inside us, any hint that it will be all right with us if some modest bit of good fortune comes our enemy’s way, we can be sure that we are teamed with God in a modest miracle of healing.

We find the grace to pray that our enemy may still be given “some crumbs off the table of grace to make his life livable.”

(pp. 6-11)

We can forgive and we must. We can love our enemies and pray for them.

“The most creative power given to the human spirit is the power to heal the wounds of a past it cannot change.”