3 Questions to Help you Forgive
This post is meant to be a helpful resource for those of us trying to pray our way through the process of forgiving someone who has wronged us. This is hard work and it often requires some wrestling with God in prayer. If you find yourself there, here are three questions to prayerfully consider.
How was I offended?
In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, the father famously runs to embrace his son who is returning home. This imagery of the running father has been described by scholars as an undignified act for a man of his stature. With this parable, Jesus wants us to know that our Father in Heaven is more in love with a lost sinner than he is with preserving his self-image. The running Father reveals the posture of a heart that forgives. God can forgive so joyfully because he isn’t offended by our sin.
When someone offends me, they diminish my standing, dignity, or honor before others. I am reminded of some harsh words someone spoke to me in front of my children. It was a sort of “dressing down” that left me feeling embarrassed. I felt offended and any thought of extending forgiveness to this person for the way they spoke to me needed to begin with my own work tending to the offense I felt.
When I pray with my offense, I consider Jesus whose life shows us what it looks like to be un-offendable. He emptied himself of his attachments and freely chose the posture of a servant. He was detached from any form of status. He didn’t cling to any positional power or authority. Therefore, he couldn’t be offended.
This is the key. It is in this act of self-emptying that one’s heart is delivered from the bondage of offense and filled instead with love. So, moving past my feelings of offense happens as I choose the self-emptying way of Jesus. It is my attachment to status and my resistance to serving others that makes forgiveness hard when I feel offended. But when I embrace the call to give my life away to others in love, I feel free to forgive.
What did I lose?
In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” The idea inherent in the word trespass is boundary violation. Someone has transgressed our boundaries and taken something from us. Or they have transgressed our boundaries and left a mark on our property. In both instances there is loss. When I consider how I might forgive someone who has trespassed against me, I often become aware that I have to prayerfully consider the loss I experienced.
The primary difficulty I experience when praying through my losses comes from a part of me that wants to deny them. I do not want to accept that this is happening to me or has happened to me. Loss can be so difficult to accept because it means our future is not going to unfold the way we want. I often feel a temptation to grab control of situations in order to fix the person or the situation that has caused the loss. But when I pray with my loss, I know the first and most important step is to accept it.
I have found that this is not a once-and-done act. I often need to prayerfully say the word, “welcome,” over and over again. This does not mean I am thankful for the loss. It doesn’t mean I like the loss. It means I accept the loss. I accept that this is happening to me. I accept that God is with me in it. I accept that my deepest desire is not to avoid this loss – it is to go through this loss, and all of life, with the companioning presence of my Father in heaven. I can let this thing I am losing go and still get what I really want, which is the Father’s presence. This is a refining experience. As I welcome my loss, I am reminded again that God will never let me down. He will never leave me, and his presence is enough to face anything the future holds. This evokes deep hope in the face of painful loss.
This act of welcoming my loss, experiencing my grief, and then noticing God’s comforting presence leads to hope about the future and sets me free to forgive. I am no longer bound by my need to prevent or deny the loss. I release it all to the Lord and I feel freedom to forgive the one who caused my loss.
Where does it hurt?
The last thing I often notice is the rawness of the hurt that comes when someone sins against me. A wound is the most intimate definition of someone trespassing our boundaries. It occurs as they violate the boundaries of our skin. A wound, metaphorically speaking, is an emotional, relational, or spiritual violation of our boundaries. When someone acts abusively towards us or when someone betrays us, there is a hurt that is deep and can be lasting. In order to truly forgive this person we must tend to the hurt of our wounds.
Something I remember when I feel hurt is that the person who hurt me cannot heal me. If I go to that person hoping that I can get them to say sorry and make the hurt go away, I will be disappointed. Only the Lord can heal my hurt. When I have faced some of the deepest hurts of my life, the promise that I cling to is this: “By his wounds, we are healed.” As I look to the wounds of Jesus, I find healing for my own hurts.
This isn’t something I can easily explain. I have found it helpful to sit in prayerful contemplation of Jesus on the cross. As I look upon Jesus, who was physically wounded, relationally betrayed, and felt emotionally abandoned, I become aware of how beautiful my Lord’s wounds are. His wounds are the markers of his extravagant love. They represent the strength of his vulnerability. They display what glory looks like in this broken and fallen world. As I contemplate the mysterious power evident in wounds borne in love, I find healing for my own wounds. That which formerly repulsed me now beckons me forth because of love.
This changes everything. I notice that deep within me there is now a desire to be open to future wounding in the name of love. I long to love as well, as gloriously, as Jesus does. Being wounded as I persevere in love feels like a small way for me to join with our Lord in his suffering for the world. When I get to this prayerful place, forgiveness not only doesn’t feel hard, it becomes something I want to do.
If you’re struggling to forgive someone who wronged you, would you consider praying with one or all of these questions? Ask yourself:
How was I offended?
What did I lose?
Where does it hurt?
As you pray with these questions, I hope you will grow in freedom to be able to forgive those who have hurt you.