January 31, 2010: The Art of Incarnation – Dave Neuhausel

Forgiveness is not an easy thing. She did this. He did that. We want things to be even. We want someone to pay. We want it all to make sense. To forgive someone, as God forgave us, is to give up the right for things to be “even” in an earthly sense. It is to say, “I demand no payment from you.” So often we hold onto unforgiveness partly because we are unable to do it, and partly because we believe down deep inside that we are making the other person pay. Yet in the end it only ends up killing us. 

None of us are responsible for sins committed against us. None of us ask someone to betray or wound us. But those things come to us, seemingly more than we would like. In those moments we have a choice. To forgive or to stay bitter. If we choose the latter, we enter into an endless emotional cycle that begins to slowly erode who we are inside – and destroys relationships in the future.