Finding Forgiveness

We’re on Day 11 of the January Wellness Challenge. If you’re following along, what elements of wellness have you found to be most challenging?

I decided to take a digital hiatus last week, so staying away from social media has been the easiest part of the challenge for me (so far, anyway). But the most difficult day, by far, was Day 7. Our challenge that day was to extend forgiveness.

Because I identify as a Christian, I know forgiveness is part of my calling–it’s right there in the Lord’s Prayer. But it’s very hard, sometimes, to let go of past hurts. Especially if we’ve been carrying them around so long that we’ve forgotten they’re with us.

For instance: not too long ago, someone I knew from high school–someone who had been intentionally unkind to me, over and over again–sent me a Facebook friend request. The moment I saw her name on the screen, my stomach tied itself in a knot. I was furious that she’d even sent the request. But until that moment, I unaware of the fact that I’d held on to any anger toward her. If someone had asked, I would have said “That was all so long ago. I don’t feel anything about her anymore.”

I would not have been lying, but I would have been wrong.

I didn’t accept the friend request. The two of us don’t have anything in common anymore, if we ever did. I had no desire to catch up. But before I clicked the Delete button, I told myself to take a few deep breaths and let go of my anger. This person can’t hurt me anymore. She has absolutely no power over my life. I didn’t want her to have power over my feelings, either.

That experience taught me something important about the way feelings hang on to us, even if we don’t intentionally hang on to them. And I think that’s one of the reasons why forgiveness sometimes makes us feel weak.

If we’re still feeling the pain of past wrongdoing, that hurt feels important. Forgiveness feels like minimizing the pain. It can feel like we’re saying What happened to me wasn’t such a big deal. There are times when that will feel true, but there are also times when the wrongdoing was horrific. How do we get to forgiveness from there?

Maybe we don’t. Perhaps certain people, and certain acts, simply cannot be forgiven. I’m willing to concede that this might be true (although the story of Dr. Everett Worthington in this article keeps me from being certain about that.) Maybe the kind of forgiveness we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer is a perfect sort of mercy that can’t exist in an imperfect human world.

But I still think it’s important to forgive whenever that’s possible. For one thing, it’s good for your health–letting go of negative feelings improves your blood pressure, immune response, and a host of other things. If you’re not aware of the anger you’re holding on to, you might be causing yourself physical trauma without even knowing it.

And perhaps that’s a good enough reason to make forgiveness a habit. If we teach our brains how to let go of anger–by acknowledging it when it arises, considering its sources, then consciously letting go of it (even if we know that release isn’t a permanent fix)–perhaps hurt and anger will find it more difficult to stick.

I learned a really important lesson about forgiveness when my mom passed away in 2015. As I’ve written here before, we had a very complicated relationship. It was the product of many different things, ranging from her mental illness (undiagnosed and untreated until very late in her life) to the profound generational divide that separated a woman born in 1933 and a girl born in 1964. I often felt like we were from different planets. And it was infuriating that, while I had to visit hers on a daily basis, she simply wasn’t interested in visiting mine. In fact, it was clear she assumed I’d eventually grow up, realize her planet was superior in all ways, and make my home there.

That never happened. Instead, as I got older, we grew farther and farther apart. But at the end of her life, my mom took a bad fall at her retirement home, breaking and dislocating her hip. Her doctors felt surgery wasn’t a valid option, given her dementia and overall physical condition. And when I walked into her hospice room, knowing we were close to the end, I realized that I didn’t have to search my heart for forgiveness–it had already found me. The tiny, broken person in that hospital bed wasn’t someone I was even a little bit angry with.

That one step away from my anger made a huge difference in the way I’ve been able to feel about my mom since then. I feel sorrow, more than anything else, about the disconnect between us. I can see that it was caused by the way her brain processed emotions and by her frustration over sacrifices no one acknowledged–mostly because they were never called sacrifices. To name them as such would have been to suggest there was something wrong with the rules for women on my mom’s planet. That was something she would never have been able to do. And that, too, must have been deeply frustrating for her.

So when it came to Day 7 of our Wellness Challenge, I made a phone call I’d been putting off. I had a pleasant conversation with someone who has hurt my feelings more times than I can count, doing my best to stay focused on the kindness that person has also shown to me.

Simply making that call was a gesture of forgiveness. It wasn’t easy–but it was possible.