Welcome to another How-To installment on Spiritual Crusade! Today we are exploring how to forgive. The first step is understanding why we should even bother. We all know forgiving others is a commandment. It’s not exactly in the Big Ten, but surely it’s implied in the first two great commandments:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
After all, how can you love your neighbor if you harbor anger, resentment, or grudges against them? What’s more, the Lord promises to forgive us, if we forgive others. (Matthew 6:14-15)
Forgiveness is a commandment that brings personal peace. But just because you should forgive, from a moral standpoint, doesn’t necessarily make it easy.
Why Forgive
Let’s dig a litter deeper into what happens when you DON’T forgive. It may seem like you’re giving someone what they deserve if you cling to the bitter feelings of hurt. But who is really being damaged or held back? Most likely, it’s you.
According to Carrie Fisher, “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
Clinging to anger or resentment is like hiding a stone in your heart. Except it’s a stone that can grow. The anger and resentment we feel in one situation or towards one person spills over into other aspects of our lives. We find ourselves less patient, less compassionate, less loving, less kind.
In other words, we become hardhearted. The spirit of the Lord withdraws when we harden our hearts. We can read about this in Helaman 6 when the Nephites hardened their hearts, turned to wickedness, and entered into pacts with the Gadianton robbers.
Of course, at this point in Nephite history, their choices and behavior were extreme and involved “murderings… plunderings…and stealings.” Holding onto a grudge is nothing like that, right? Of course it’s not. But it’s not all kittens and roses either. We inflict damage on our spirits when we nurture anger and resentment. Life gets tougher. We feel more alone. Our bitterness grows. Even if we are justified in feeling hurt, refusing to forgive others only harms us more.
Forgiveness Facts
In a Johns Hopkins article titled Forgiveness: Your Health Depends on It, Karen Swartz, M.D. explains that chronic anger raises your risk of heart disease. It puts you in fight-or-flight mode, which increases the risk of depression and diabetes and can also negatively impact immune response. Forgiving, on the other hand, can reduce stress levels and lead to improved health.
In a recent continuing education article, the American Psychological Association illustrates that forgiving others can improve mental and physical health. They cite numerous studies to support these findings as well as therapeutic interventions and further reading to help people learn to forgive.
The International Handbook of Anger reviews a mass of literature, demonstrating that “anger can color people’s perceptions, form their decisions, and guide their behavior while they remain angry, regardless of whether the decisions at hand are related to the source of their anger.”
This indicates that anger can not only harm us physically and emotionally, but can also impact our decision making, even on unrelated issues. We’ve all experienced making a bad decision when angry. Chronic anger can make us feel stuck, our thoughts circling unproductively. When we can’t manage to forgive someone, we end up marinating in a stew of negative emotions.
Benefits of Forgiving
In an Ensign article by Renee Roy Harding, she describes her struggle to forgive the drunk driver who took her mother’s life: “It was clear to me that malice can slow or stop our eternal progression and separate us from the love of our Father in Heaven and the Savior. I knew more than ever that forgiveness was the key to the peace I so desperately craved. We’re here on earth to learn difficult lessons, and our Heavenly Father and Savior will never abandon us.” – Could I Learn to Forgive? Her story brings hope and inspiration for all of us who struggle to forgive.
Karen Swartz, M.D. further explores the benefits of forgiving and letting go of grudges in The Healing Power of Forgiveness. She explains that when people forgive, they tend to need less medications, their blood pressure goes back down, they sleep better, and experience better health overall.
James E. Faust explains in The Healing Power of Forgiveness that when we forgive those who have hurt us, our self-esteem rises, as does our overall well-being. “Some hold grudges for a lifetime,” he says, “unaware that courageously forgiving those who have wronged us is wholesome and therapeutic.”
When it comes down to it, hopefully our efforts to forgive are based on more than self interest, on more than a desire for God to forgive our own failings or a desire for relief from the pain of harboring hurt and anger. Either way, what really matters is that we nurture the desire to forgive. We seek God’s grace. We ask for His divine help in softening our hearts and healing our hurts.
What Does it Mean to Forgive?
The easy thing in the short term is to stew in our hard feelings, our sense of being wronged, our indignation and demand restitution. It takes great courage to set that all aside and simply forgive. As Mahatma Ghandi has said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
But what exactly does forgiving mean? We may sometimes find ourselves asking: What if the person I need to forgive isn’t sorry or doesn’t think they did anything wrong? What if the situation is ongoing? Doesn’t forgiving give them a pass? Doesn’t it dismiss my hurt or my concerns?
Remember, forgiving isn’t about whether or not the other person was in the wrong. Forgiving is about your own healing, finding inner peace, and about setting yourself right with God.
First, if you are in an ongoing dangerous situation, seek help to find safety. Second, recognize that forgiveness is for you, and you are not alone in this. God will help you. Friends and family can help. Ministers and church leaders can help.
Forgiving involves the decision to let go of the anger and resentment over the hurt you experienced. In a way, you can view it as a choice to refuse to let the harm someone did hurt you any longer. It’s also a choice to reconnect with the spirit, to let God more fully into your heart and your life again. Why let someone who hurt you also separate you from God? That is what we are doing when we nurture the anger, bitterness, hurt and resentment instead of forgiving.
Sometimes forgiveness is easier when we try to develop compassion or understanding for the other person. Or when we seek to see them the way the Lord sees them and to understand they are imperfect children of God, just like us. That still doesn’t excuse what they’ve done, but it can soften our hearts enough that we may be able to let the anger go.
If the situation is ongoing, choosing to forgive can help you find an inner peace and ability to direct your life independent of another’s actions. It can release you from the power their actions have wielded over you in the past. Remember, the point of forgiving is not to change the other person, but to find your own way forward. It’s a choice for spiritual freedom, comfort and relief.
“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
Finding Hope That You Can Forgive
Elder Tad R. Callister has taught: “One of the blessings of the Atonement is that we can receive of the Savior’s succoring powers. Isaiah spoke repeatedly of the Lord’s healing, calming influence. He testified that the Savior was ‘a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat’ (Isaiah 25:4). As to those who sorrow, Isaiah declared that the Savior possessed the power to ‘comfort all that mourn’ (Isaiah 61:2), and ‘wipe away tears from off all faces’ (Isaiah 25:8; see also Revelation 7:17); ‘revive the spirit of the humble’ (Isaiah 57:15); and ‘bind up the brokenhearted’ (Isaiah 61:1; see also Luke 4:18; Psalm 147:3). So expansive was his succoring power that he could exchange ‘beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness’ (Isaiah 61:3).
“Oh, what hope soars in those promises! … His spirit heals; it refines; it comforts; it breathes new life into hopeless hearts. It has the power to transform all that is ugly and vicious and worthless in life to something of supreme and glorious splendor. He has the power to convert the ashes of mortality to the beauties of eternity.” – The Infinite Atonement
When we have been hurt, we often feel broken – broken hearted or just broken in general. Cristina B. Franco addressed this feeling of brokenness in her recent talk, The Healing Power of Jesus Christ. She describes a piano that had been shattered beyond repair:
“Sisters and brothers, aren’t we all like this piano, a little broken, cracked, and damaged, feeling like we will never be the same again? However, as we come unto Jesus Christ by exercising faith in Him, repenting, and making and keeping covenants, our brokenness—whatever its cause—can be healed. This process, which invites the Savior’s healing power into our lives, does not just restore us to what we were before but makes us better than we ever were.”
“It can be done. Man can conquer self. Man can overcome. Man can forgive all who have trespassed against him and go on to receive peace in this life and eternal life in the world to come.” – President Spencer W. Kimball, The Miracle of Forgiveness.
Practical Steps You CAN Take
- Come to understand WHY you should forgive. All of God’s commandments are given for our benefit, including the commandment to forgive. “I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men” (D&C 64:10). Clinging to hurt, bitterness, or anger, even if justified, only harms ourselves.
- Recognize the benefits of choosing to forgive. We reap physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits when we forgive others.
- Understand what forgiveness means. Forgiving is choosing to let go of hard feelings. It is a choice to rise above the hurt you have experienced. It can often involve compassion for the one who hurt you, but does not excuse their behavior or absolve them from their responsibility to make things right. It certainly involves reliance on Christ’s atoning grace for comfort and for the strength to rise above ourselves.
- Find hope that you can forgive. Study stories of forgiveness in the scriptures. Here’s a summary of forgiveness stories from the Book of Mormon. Some Biblical stories: The Prodigal Son, Peter asking how often he should forgive, Joseph forgives his brothers for selling him into Egypt, Jesus forgives the woman caught in adultery.
- Set a reminder to read or listen next month’s post: How to Forgive, part 2. We’ll dig deep into finding the courage to forgive and share methods and habits that will help you on your way. It will post on the third Monday of November!
Food for thought: How has clinging to hurt derailed you? How has forgiving brought you relief, energy, and newfound peace?
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