Forgiveness Is Not My Weakness: The Key To Forgiveness "Releasing the Hurt and Pain"

Releasing the Hurt & Pain

The question has always been asked have you truly forgiven if you haven’t forgotten. I often times struggle with forgetting what I’ve forgiven others for doing.

At the age of seven, I experienced one of the worst moments of my life when my father died at the age of 49. Me and my siblings became the victims of a heated probate battle with our aunt’s and uncle’s over my father’s estate. With a will in place and instructions to award my father’s estate to his children, my aunt’s and uncle’s fought us for what was ours. Being so young at the time I didn’t really understand what was going on. Seeing my mother deal with legal trauma that was being thrown at her by my aunt’s and uncle’s wounded me and caused my feelings for my aunts and uncles to be unpleasant as I got older. I resented the fact that my own family wanted to steal from me and my siblings. And a deep rooted bitterness created a level of tension that the fellowship was broken between us. I’d carried these hurts for a very long time. Not being able to let go of what had happened, I made it a point to make sure that this would never happen to my children. I forgave my family members but I couldn’t forget their actions that often causes me to reflect on what happened.

You might be facing the same dilemma where you can forgive but can’t forget what has happened

to you.

Now I do believe that you can forgive but will never forget and to be completely honest and genuine in your forgiveness where you’ve let it go. Forgiving and letting it go doesn’t mean it never happened but that what has happened is done and over with.

One of the things that I’ve come to discover is that the greatest enemy of forgiveness is fear. Fear

has a crippling effect that creates an imagination of a reoccurrence of past events happening again

in present tense, and the reality is what has happened in the past is over. Whenever we give life to dead issues we resurrect the hurt and pain and allow it to take center stage in our emotions.

We must become firm in our forgiveness and not allow the hauntings of our past to rob us from the victory of our today. To be firm in our forgiveness we must take charge of our mental image and subject it to the image of Christ. Now this is a daily initiative because it is so easy to go back down memory lane and have a mental image breakdown. But when we take the steps to rid our thoughts from the anxieties of our past we free the authority and the liberties of Christ to be active in our thinking which causes forgiveness to be permanent and not temporary to those we’ve extended it to.

Be blessed,

Baron Hopgood