Marriage Essentials: Forgiveness
Understanding forgiveness is essential to building a strong marriage.
Forgiveness is at the heart of a good marriage. But forgiveness can be hard to understand and harder still to do.
One woman told me she didn't know what the big deal about forgiveness was. She had no trouble with forgiveness. If someone offended her, she just dropped it and forgot about it. I said, "You mean, you forget the offense? Or the person?" She thought a moment and said, "I guess I forget the person."
I thought I was a good forgiver. One day I realized I had been letting hurts stick to me instead. I discovered this ugly little collection of them in my soul that made the love I gave anemic.
A vibrant marriage cannot exist on anemic love. And, in a relationship that is designed to be life-long, you can't forget the other person whenever you are hurt, much as you might like to.
For the sake of our marriages, let's explore the meaning of forgiveness and look first at some things forgiveness is NOT.
- Forgiveness is not just forgetting something. Burying it. Smothering it. Pretending it didn't happen. If you cover the weeds in your garden, they are still there. Real forgiveness is tearing the weeds out by the roots, so the garden will flourish.
- Forgiveness is not excusing something, or saying it was okay. We forgive people of things that are not okay. Lewis Smedes, in his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve, says that when we excuse people, we don't need to forgive them. We excuse people when we understand that they weren't to blame. We have to forgive people when they are to blame.
- Forgiveness is not tolerance. The dictionary definitions of tolerance are all about enduring something hard or painful, or working up the strength to bear with something awful. The difference between forgiveness and tolerance can be seen in a society's attitude toward crime. We can forgive crime, but we will destroy ourselves if we tolerate it.
- Forgiveness is also not just a matter of course. Hurts and breaks in relationships don't just heal themselves. Healing takes purposeful, forgiveness-ful action.
- Forgiveness is not the same thing as trust. Forgiveness may mean giving someone the opportunity to rebuild trust., but we don't automatically trust everyone we forgive in this life.
Next: What Forgiveness Means
