Forgiveness

The concept of forgiveness was foreign to me for quite a while. I didn't understand when people were forgiving me and didn't know how or why I should forgive others.

Before I go any further, if you relate to this, I need you to know it's not healthy. Your body, mind, heart, and soul all suffer because of it. Please read on, and I pray this helps.

From early on, then into early adulthood, I let anger drive me. When I talk about this to people, it's not complicated, but it is sad. And I know it's sad because I can now recognize it in others. I let anger drive me because it was what I was most familiar with.

I could turn almost anything I wanted into a source of anger.

The thing that most people forget to mention when talking about living like this is it isn't just anger. It's also fear.

The fear comes from actions occurring so often that the negative feelings come to take the place of positive ones. Like I said, for me, it was anger.

But it can be depression, isolation, self-centeredness, or a myriad of things. The companion to all of these is fear.

So, what does this have to do with forgiveness?

I bring it up because it can be an identifier of things when we aren't in that place where forgiveness is understandable.

There are times where we say the words. I know I did. And at the time, I thought I meant it, but later I'd find myself holding onto the resentment of the action that caused me to think I needed to say the words.

This is a clear sign you haven't been able to forgive.

Forgiveness is an act of healing for you and that which you are forgiving.

The two most prominent examples of forgiveness are forgiving others, and what I've found to be most difficult, forgiving ourselves.

Take my biological father. I'm blessed in the fact that I only have two clear, distinct memories of him, but both of those memories are ones of violence.

I also know that the actions he took that I remember and even more so the ones I don't remember and have just been told about were the impetus of the various forms of hurt from my younger years.

The results of my biological father's actions impacted almost every aspect of my life then. It caused me not to be able to trust. It made me question God because I heard people call Him "father," it hurt everyone in my family. That pain carried through to how we interacted with each other and others. The ripples went a long way.

It wasn't until I was in my late 20s, after I'd had enough experience in life, that I came to understand that there could have been something that caused him to be the way he was.

It was also a few years after I started learning what forgiveness was.

After spending an evening thinking of those things, I forgave him for everything he'd done and the actions that were caused because of what he'd done.

Now come to about six weeks ago, and one of my brothers began researching him. I had done the same quite a while back when another brother asked if I could find out anything about his health. I was valid reasoning, so I looked into it.

My brother researching him found the same things I did. He had sobered up, changed, had a new family, and for all intents was loved by them and his community before his death.

My brother sent these things to the family. He didn't do it out of malice but thought we'd want to know.

As I said, I knew these things but never shared them because I knew it would cause pain and questions.

I wrote my brother and explained that he didn't need to if he was doing this for those of us who shared my biological father. The brother doing the research has a different father, so technically, he's my half-brother, but my heart doesn't divide things like that. He's just my brother.

Anyway, I told him that most of us would only have to dredge up painful memories thinking about him. My greatest concern was for my full brother and the questions it may cause for him.

I mention all of this because I had forgiven my father, but that didn't mean I forgot what he did and that it doesn't still have a way of coming back.

But by forgiving him, I was able to look at it from a much healthier perspective. Yes, thinking of his actions is troubling. Hurting women and children makes no sense to me, but he did that a lot.

Forgiving him before, though, allowed me to put the painful memories aside and allowed me to remember why I forgave him.

It wasn't just for him; it was for me as well. If I hadn't forgiven him, I would have continued to carry the anger and fear caused by his actions. When I forgave him, I could release that and take that through to the most recent instance where he was brought back up.

This is just one detailed example. I had to learn to forgive every one that had ever done something that would need forgiveness: teachers, family, friends, enemies, and so on.

It was quite a process, but I found that I began feeling better in almost every sense. I say almost because the work wasn't done.

The hard part was needed most of all, that was learning to forgive me.

For me, this came in two stages.

The first stage was finding anyone I'd hurt in the past and apologizing.

If you've read other things I've written here, you'll know that self-reflection is something I find essential. Painful at first but essential.

I spent a week thinking through this and made a list. Believe me when I say that wasn't easy. It's putting a mirror up reflecting your wrong decisions, insecurities, ability to hurt others, and your ability to hurt yourself.

Most importantly, it was also impacting my relationship with God. While I had given my life to Him by this time, I knew I needed to take the steps that He asked.

I also could have taken the easy way out. I could have found these people and simply messaged or emailed them. And with some I had to, the distances between us were far, and some didn't have phone numbers I could locate.

But most of the people I met face to face. What shocked me was that every one of them graciously accepted my apology and forgave me.

This step was a good start, but there was still more.

If you remember, from the beginning, I talked about letting anger and fear guide me for a good bit of time.

I had come to understand that while anger and fear caused me to act out and hurt others to where I asked for forgiveness, I had done many of these things to hurt myself.

While self-harm was a part of coping with my younger years' pain and emptiness, as I got older emotional harm took its place in a very real and harmful way.

The simple truth of it is that when we are hurting, angry, and fearful, we aren't in a place to grasp the severity of what we're feeling and doing. Anger feeds the hurt, hurt feeds the anger, and fear embraces both to make them stronger and place us in a place of near panic.

This isn't justification for the actions but an attempt to help explain why some things may have been done.

After coming to this realization, along with the grace of those that had forgiven me, I had to take stock of why I did the things I did and then allow myself to forgive myself for those things.

After this, I made sure to never forget those actions. I didn't do this out of wanting to hurt myself but to learn from them.

As I said, forgiveness is healing. And with that healing, I was able to gain knowledge and experience to help others and ensure I didn't repeat the past.

We're human, so we'll always have times where we are hurt then become angry and fearful. But through forgiving myself and learning from that, I'm able to take a moment and center myself.

This is just one of the many things that forgiveness and God gave me.

It's at moments like these where I feel God's embrace, and while I ask Him for forgiveness that I went there, I know He already forgave me.

There is no greater gift.