Anger and Forgiveness

Many people wonder if they have forgiven someone when they still feel angry at what that person did to them. Anger and forgiveness are separate feelings. If you are real and in touch with your feelings you will be angry. In fact, if you were hurt you should be angry. When you are mad at your children for doing something wrong do you feel you don’t love them or love them less? Of course not, you love them and you are angry at them. You would run through fire to save them no matter how angry you get with their behavior. Forgiveness means you can still be angry and forgive. Wishing someone well in life (forgiveness) does not mean you are still not angry for what they did to you. The root here is not anger it is hate. Forgiveness and hate do not mix. Hate must be dealt with by forgiveness. Hate is aimed at persons. Anger keeps us from allowing the same thing to happen to us again. Hate is tied to revenge. Hate eats us up from the inside out. Anger vents our feelings and is a release that is not aimed at someone.

Going a little deeper into reality we don’t need to like someone to have forgiven them. When a person does not change their character why should we like them? They may not be a likable person. Forgiving them does not mean we have to want to spend time with them or even talk to them. We do not have to like them to have forgiven them. In fact it is the likable ones that can trick us. We can be tricked into thinking that since we like them we should trust them and let them hurt us again. Cheaters are likely to be likable people and want to sneak back into our lives to do damage again just as they did before. But forgiving them does not mean we have to be dumb enough to trust them a second time around and then get hurt. Forgiveness is hard to do. No doubt about it, it is very hard to forgive. Most of us struggle with it and take our time doing it. After we have done it a few times, we can lose our touch again and slip back now and then. Backsliding is not a failure. It’s only a slip on the way to success. Forgiving frees us to hope. Hope is a faith in what can be. Hope is based on a faith that lasting trust is possible, but not inevitable. Hope is within our spirit and it can not co-exist there with bitterness.

“When we forgive someone we change the course of a meandering river that could, if we let it, carry us on an aimless, endless current of remembered hurt and frustrated rage…. Where will the river take us? Who can say? We cannot control the winding river we follow to our future any more than we could change the past. It will take us to the possible goods for which we hope.” (page 175-6)

We lose hope for a better future is to be captive of a worse past. When the horror and hurt of the past cloud our thinking about the future there is no hope. We begin to think it was in the past how it will be in the future and we feel hopeless. Forgiving gives us hope of the possibilities of a better future.