Forgiveness isn’t an action.  It’s a process, and it can take forever.

Emotional hurt is different from physical hurt.  You can’t see it.  There is no physical scar; no bruise; no dent that you can take to the body shop and get fixed.  Emotional pain will sneak up on you for a long time; maybe forever.

People are going to hurt you in your life.  There is no avoiding that.  Every time someone does something that is hurtful to you, you have to make a choice.  You can choose to hold onto the hurt and be angry, or you can make a choice to forgive them.  It’s perfectly fine to be mad at first.  It’s natural to have an angry response to someone hurting you.  But the only way to get over the pain is to choose forgiveness.

The problem comes in later, after you’ve forgiven the person.  You can think that you’ve gotten over it, then something happens that triggers the pain, and all of a sudden you’re having an emotional reaction and you don’t know why.  Then you have to make the same choice again; to be mad or to renew the forgiveness.  It kind of doesn’t seem fair.  Someone does something to hurt you, and you’re the one who has to spend time and energy, maybe for years, continuing to forgive them.

But think about the alternative of staying angry.  If you’re mad at someone, what do they feel?  They don’t feel anything.  They can’t feel your anger.  It has no effect on them at all.  All it does is hurt you.  It doesn’t feel good to be mad.  It’s stressful to yourself, and to the people you care about.

Either way you choose, you have to live with some amount of discomfort.  You either deal with the triggers of the past hurt, and repeatedly choose forgiveness, or you choose to stay angry, and you deal with the stress that that choice will add to your life.

I choose to live my life on my own terms.  I choose to live my life on purpose.  I choose forgiveness.  What will you choose?