You know what that other person likely did that day? Ate a sandwich, answered some e-mails, had a meeting, returned some pants to the mall. I was the only one paying the piper, spending energy and mental space not on healing but on imagined vindication. What a waste! That person was not on the hook in the slightest, but I sure was, day after day, month after month, disastrously, year after year. I deferred my own peace, and the only loss was mine.
The work of forgiveness is so challenging—the actual work of it. The naming, grieving, empathizing, releasing. It’s like a death. A death of what we wanted, what we expected, what we’d hoped for, what we deserved and didn’t receive. Burying those expectations, because they are indeed dead, is truly cause for grief. Expect to feel profound loss as you put them six feet under. Into the casket also goes control, exoneration, maybe even resolution. Those don’t belong to you. We don’t get to control other people or outcomes. I am as devastated about this as you.
How to begin? Oh heavenly mercies. There isn’t a template for this work, but I can tell you my early steps to forgiveness. God was super clear: Pray for this person every day, which was the meanest thing He ever said to me. I was furious. I think I even said something petulant to God like, “The hell I will!” and He was all, “Do it, Potty Mouth.” So my prayers started rather, well, shallow: Please don’t let this person get hit by a car today. Amen. That was as far as I could go. The anger around my heart was still stretched tight. I was obedient to the letter of the law only.
But as that practice went on, something started to happen. God loosened that old anger bit by bit, and the prayers gave way to deeper, more meaningful requests. Mind you, the increments were small and took more time than I wanted to give, but I started thinking of that person as the kid they once were, whose story I knew included loss and abandonment. God began showing me triggers I had ignited carelessly, tapping into lifelong wounds that set off a disproportional reaction. Prayer awakened enough humility to own my contribution to the free fall, a difficult admission. And would you believe after staying the course long enough, I developed a tenderness toward the person who hurt us, and it was sincere. Prayer didn’t heal the relationship, but it healed me.
God is still in the miracle business, and sometimes those miracles are in us.
While forgiveness might feel like abandoning justice, it actually sets us free. It liberates us from the crushing responsibility to oversee the resolution, which may or may not ever come. It removes any authority another person holds over our wholeness; it steals its power. Surprisingly, it can even bring us to the point where we wish our offender well, where we desire his or her peace too. It gently takes our minds and hearts and attention and brings them back to the present, to be with the ones who are here. Forgiveness gives us back our life and gives us back to our life. It is holy and hard work that says to God: Here is this sad thing. It is all Yours to fix or mend or redeem or simply bear witness. I am prying my hands off and freeing them up for other work.
We bury what we wanted and accept what we have.
But then, new life. Rising up from the grave, like tender little shoots. So small at first. So fragile. But forgiveness clears the way for new growth, even if the other person is completely unrepentant. We can still live. We can still be vibrant. We grow and develop and find beauty again, shoots of hope pushing up through the rubble. And soon enough, when we nurture grace and release instead of anger and resentment, a bloom, an unfolding of life again.
Two quick words: If the person who hurt you has a history of mainly healthy behavior, if they’ve been mostly safe, by all means, press not only into forgiveness but reconciliation. A broken relationship mended by forgiveness can be even stronger than it was before. Henri Nouwen wrote: “Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”2 Confrontations, difficult conversations, these are hard, I know. But better to prioritize a restored relationship than let it go down without a fight simply because we are conflict averse. Earth is indeed Forgiveness School.
Second, forgiveness comes easier to people who regularly ask forgiveness themselves. It is mature Christian practice to own our offenses and remain humble enough to apologize when we’ve wounded, intentionally or not. This posture makes a tender people, a safer family with softer edges. All of us love poorly at some point, and infusing our community with ownership and repentance is contagious. Say you’re sorry. Ask forgiveness. This leads not only to stronger relationships but to better humans, and this world needs better humans.
It is worth the work. Beth Moore wrote on Twitter: “God is raising you mighty and mighty doesn’t come pretty. Pay the price.” The cost of forgiveness is high but the payoff is higher: health, peace, wholeheartedness, grace. It goes on: resilience, maturity, compassion, depth. God raises us back up mighty in love, through the pain, through the mess, stronger than before. Forgiveness does not erase your past—a healed memory is not a deleted memory—but it does enlarge your future, increase your love, and set you free.
It’s worth it.
Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.1
— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
CHAPTER 19
POTATO AND KNIFE
My body completely behaved in my twenties. It delivered three babies like a boss, snapped back into shape no matter what the mouth fed the stomach, and it crossed the Thirty Threshold in a minuscule size six. What a mannerly body! What a champion! What a trooper! What an underappreciated star with a clear shelf life!
These days, the first number on the scale is the same but the second is the difference between a toddler and an independent reader, God bless us each and every one. My body’s history communicates an obvious possibility, a size I actually was even after being pregnant twenty-seven out of fifty-six months, but it can’t figure out how to get back there, or really even near there. After careful analysis, I think I’ve narrowed the problem down:
Food. And drinks.
All of them.
I love basically all the food and all the drinks.