Choosing Forgiveness… Again

I know I’ve explored this theme before on here, but I guess you could say it has been the overriding theme of my life this year — forgiveness.

Is there anything more complicated?

Up until this year, I thought forgiveness was largely a feeling.  I was under the impression that forgiveness meant that your heart felt free.  It meant that pain didn’t hurt any more.  It was a clean slate.

And forgiveness was always relatively easy for me because the slights against me were always relatively mild.

But then when I came across situations this year when feelings were still raw and anger could resurface if I let it, I thought that the problem was in my heart.  I simply didn’t forgive well enough.

But that opinion is starting to change for me as I realize that forgiveness isn’t so much a feeling as it is a very conscious choice.  It’s not something that happens to us.  Rather, it’s something that we must do.  Day in and day out.

The thing is that forgiving someone doesn’t mean that the injustices done to us no longer sting.  It doesn’t mean that rejections and betrayal no longer stab at your heart.  Forgiveness doesn’t take away the pain.  It just takes away the dark cloud hovering around the pain, threatening to overcome.

I’ve seen people who refuse to forgive.  At times, it’s as if people wear their pain as a cloak around their shoulders.  They wrap themselves up in it and fortify themselves with it until their very identity becomes synonymous with the pain they have experienced.

And I see that, and I’m filled with fear.  I never want that to become me.

And so when my forgiveness faces moments of weakness, I start worrying and wondering what I’m doing wrong.

But what 2012 has taught me is that there is no reason to fear pain at injustice.  If someone hurts us, that hurt can sting for awhile.  And it’s okay if anger sometimes creeps up.  It reminds us that we are human.  Instead of running from it, we need to accept it and then choose, again, to forgive.

Maybe at some point, forgiveness becomes a feeling.  Perhaps at some point it becomes natural and effortless.  I pray so.  But until that time, I guess all I can do is make the choice.  And make it again.  And then make it again.  Until one day it becomes less difficult and more natural.

Finding forgiveness in our hearts can be a battle.  But the only other option we have is bitterness.  And so the fight must be fought until one day it is hopefully won.  Perhaps it’s really the one noble battle left in this world.