Forgiveness

Tags

forgive, forgiven, forgiveness, ready

What does it mean to forgive? The dictionary describes it as:

1. to grant pardon for or remission of (an offense, debt, etc.); absolve.

2. to give up all claim on account of; remit (a debt, obligation, etc.).

3. to grant pardon to (a person).

4. to cease to feel resentment against: to forgive one’s enemies.

5. to cancel an indebtedness or liability of: to forgive the interest owed on a loan.

Well.. you get the idea.

It’s not too hard to know what forgiveness means the hard part is to do the forgiving. It’s not easy to walk up to a person who seriously wronged you and say “Hey, I forgive you for all that you’ve done.” It’s definitely not easy. Because as much as we would like to disagree the bad things people do to us scar us.. we become hard and distrusting. We don’t welcome people back into our lives as easily as we did before.

But when do we forgive? Is there is period of time that it should happen or is it whenever we’re ready? When are we ready? Will we ever be ready?

More recently in my life I have had the opportunity to forgive people who have hurt me. For the most part I have been able to forgive all and let it go. However there are those who I’m not sure I can ever forgive and that’s because I believe to be forgiven you should be sorry for what you did.. those couple of people will never change and until they come up to me and apologize I don’t believe they will ever change.. and that’s their problem.

Honestly though, I don’t dwell on it, I’m not worried about people who have wronged me because firstly I believe in karma and secondly they aren’t worth my time. I find that forgiveness is good but so is moving on and at this point in my life I find that it’s definitely easier to move on. Maybe someday things will change but until then I will forgive what I can, forget what I need to and move on with my life.

I may have a long road ahead of me, a road that will teach me to forgive fully. I’m going to travel down that road but in the meantime I have lots of other lessons to learn and thankfully time to learn them.