The work of forgiveness 9

In my process, once I  uncovered my expectations of the person I need to forgive, and then listed what behaviors needed to be forgiven, I was surprised to find I needed to add a step before I could continue to forgiveness.

3. What was it about these behaviors that made me angry or hurt?

While I knew the behaviors on my list made me angry, one thing I have learned over the years is that I often do not know why I am angry. Or hurt. Or happy. Or sad. Or any emotion, really. I have to think very honestly about the cause of my emotion before I understand it.

I used to think emotions were these pure things that come upon you very suddenly, and that they were always true and trustworthy. I thought they could be counted on in life to steer you in the right direction.

I was very wrong. I have learned from experience that emotions are easily manipulated and can come upon you so suddenly that sometimes you can't handle them. They are raw things, and they can be very untrustworthy.

So when I am in this process of forgiveness, this step forces me to look at why the person's behavior has made me angry, or hurt, or sad. What has happened because of the behavior? What are the effects? As I contemplate these things, I also check my emotions, to see whether they are self-serving or genuine.

Step 1 helps you understand what you expected from them. Step 2 compiles a list of what they did. Step 3 looks at the damage resulting from the person's actions.

I have been surprised as I go through this process how often I am not angry or hurt because of what happened to me. More often I am upset at what happened to others. So as you go through step 3, do not hesitate to look beyond what was done to you, and include the bigger picture of how others were affected in your consideration.

As with the first two steps in the process, take your time, be thorough and honest, and bathe your thinking in prayer. Ask God to show you what really needs forgiving.

When you are finished with this step, you should have a pretty good idea of what it is you really need to forgive.

The work of forgiveness 8

A look at the second of the items in the process of forgiveness I am using.

2. What specific behaviors by this person violated my expectations?

Early on I realized I couldn't just call a person to mind with only a general sense of what they had done, and then forgive them. Whenever I tried to do it that way, I later would remember some specific incidents and behaviors I hadn't earlier considered, but which were definitely part of the picture. Then I would feel like I really hadn't forgiven them because I had not forgiven them for those specific things.

The result was that I felt as though I had gotten nowhere and that they were still on my "still to be forgiven" pile.

Since general forgiving wasn't going to work for me, I realized that for each person I needed to make a list of specific things that had been done that needed forgiving.

How I compiled my lists

This takes some time; don't rush things. It may take several days or weeks of consideration for you to come up with a good list.

You should find a quiet space to draw up your list.

It helps tremendously to pray before, during and after the list making time. Ask God to show you the real truth of the matter. Ask him to help you be fair. Ask to see things in a new way—the way he wants you to see them. Ask to be shown which things are the most important, and which are more minor.

Stay as concrete as you can and focus on specific actions, incidents and behaviors. If these things seem to be part of a pattern, try to figure out what the pattern is. I found that at the end most of my lists consisted of patterns of behavior, and that individual incidents were just examples of those patterns.

Once you have what you feel is a fairly comprehensive list, allow yourself time to reflect and edit. I find I typically add a couple more things upon reflection, and also modify some of what I already have written down, clarifying, being more fair or more precise, seeing things in a different way, etc.

It is OK to cross things off the list that you realize are not a big deal. It is OK to suddenly realize something new and add it to the list. The point of making the list is to figure out the scope of what needs forgiving.

Once you have a settled list, it is time to move to the third step of the process.

The work of forgiveness 7

Here is a closer look at the first step in the forgiveness process I am using.

1. What do I expect from a person with this kind of relationship to me? (My expectations of a co-worker, for instance, are different from what I expect from family.)

I noticed it was much easier for me to forgive some kinds of people than others. I could not figure out why until it dawned on me that I had different expectations for someone who was, say, a friend, than someone who was, for example, a paid professional.

I realized that if I had few expectations of someone, they were a lot easier to forgive. If I had a lot of expectations, even if I wasn't really aware of them, I found myself struggling to forgive without quite knowing why.

It hit me one day a few weeks ago that I was treating one group of people differently than another. After sitting with this for quite some time, I threw up my hands and said in exasperation, "So-and-So is easy to forgive, because they didn't know any better, but Person XYZ absolutely should have known better."

I had a different, higher standard for Person XYZ than I did for So-and-So. Was that fair? When I looked at my relationship with and expectations of each of the two people, I realized it was. They had done similar things I needed to forgive. But one person was in a position of authority and leadership, while the other was not. I had legitimately different expectations for each person.

That's when I realized that what I expected needed to be a kind of baseline to factor into forgiveness. Knowing my expectations helped me to understand why behavior that didn't live up to them was so troubling to me. It gave me a context and a key to moving forward with forgiveness.

The work of forgiveness 6

I should issue a warning about this forgiveness business.

I have found one of the most important, and healing, things about it is a willingness to be completely honest and to seek God's truth in the matter, wherever it takes you. And that includes being shown that sometimes you are more than the victim. Sometimes you had a part in what happened and need to ask God for forgiveness for your role before you can move on to forgive others.

I suspect this is part of the reason why we put off forgiving. We know, somewhere deep inside, that we were not 100 percent the victim, that some of the fault lies in ourselves. When I have been at least open to this possibility, sometimes I sense things I could have done differently or attitudes I harbored that contributed to what went wrong. Other times I sense no fault on my part. But it is good and pleasing to God to be open and available to the real truth of what happened.

As difficult as it can be, if you did have a part in things, discovering what it was, coming to terms with it, and bringing it before God can be very freeing for yourself, and can help you on your road to forgiving others.

Important note: I want to be clear that I'm not talking here about forgiving emotional or physical abuse, rape, incest or other heinous acts where there was a clear aggressor and a clear victim. For that I believe seeking professional counseling and legal help is essential, and that you should not be searching internally for what you might have done to "lead on" the aggressor or do any other such blaming of yourself. You may actually have been in this situation for years because aggressors in these circumstances often pull that ploy. It is part of their abuse. In your case, getting better may actually mean learning to stop searching for "your part" in what happened. Trained professionals can help.

The work of forgiveness 5

Why did I need a step-by-step process before I could forgive?

I found that once I had gotten a place where I wanted to forgive someone, I was looking at a tangled-up ball of thread. There was what they had done, how I and others had been hurt, the ripple effects and collateral damage that had ensued, residual feelings of fondness I had towards them, how God was in the situation, my anger at the sin itself, and on and on and on.

I simply did not know how to look at this jumble of emotions, anger, judgment and love and just forgive.

I wanted to be fair. I did not want to leave something out. I wanted to bring God into it. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to acknowledge that I and others had been damaged. I wanted to show compassion. I did not want to let the person off the hook by pretending what they did was OK.

Just looking at the tangled ball of thread and trying to forgive the whole thing was not going to get me anywhere. I needed to untangle it. And the only way I knew how to do that was to go step by step, figure out what my expectations had been (one pile of threads), what specific actions had violated them (another pile), and why this had made me so angry (yet another pile). Only then could I move on to resting in God and moving towards forgiveness.

The work of forgiveness 4

One of the difficulties in forgiving is how to go about it. I learned a long time ago that forgiveness has nothing to do with excusing the behavior, pretending it did not happen or that it did not hurt. The painful behavior happened. It was wrong. Forgiveness is not forgetting. Forgiveness does not give a pass to the behavior.

Nor does forgiveness equal reconciliation. Forgiveness can happen without contacting the offender. It does not mean you need to restore a relationship with them. It is in large part about not allowing the behavior of the person to continue to dominate and consume your life in the future. It is a gift you give yourself, that allows you to move on with scars, rather than open wounds.

Because I had a number of people and situations to forgive, I realized I needed a multi-step process to help me with forgiveness this time around. I needed to forgive each individual for only the behaviors they produced, I needed to be as thorough as I could, and I wanted to be as fair as possible. Here is what I came up with, which so far is working for me. I will examine each step in the process in some detail in future posts.

A forgiveness process

1. What do I expect from a person with this kind of relationship to me? (My expectations of a co-worker, for instance, are different from what I expect from family.)

2. What specific behaviors by this person violated my expectations?

3. What was it about these behaviors that made me angry or hurt?

4. Bring steps 1-3 before the Lord, resting in him to help me forgive and gain insight into the person and situation

5. Reflect on what I am learning, come up with new perspectives, continue to an attitude of forgiveness, and realize there may or may not be an actual moment when I feel the work is complete. It may be more of a continuum where I gradually come to feel more forgiving than I had before.

6. Have some clarity about what the forgiveness will look like in this case. I may realize forgiving one person looks different from forgiving another.

The work of forgiveness 3

A lesson I learned more than a decade ago, when I had to do some other major forgiveness work related to the church, has been helpful to me again this time around.

And that is, you cannot just sit down and force yourself to forgive because you know you're supposed to. Or because yes, it's the right thing to do. Or because, if you're a Christian, it's something Jesus thought was pretty important and you feel terrible about not doing it. Or because you realize it's been a while and you need to get on with it.

You have to want to forgive before you can start the process of forgiving.

The thing I learned the first time around, is that if you realize you don't want to forgive, you can ask God to help you want to want to forgive. Let that sink in. If you don't yet want to forgive, it is perfectly acceptable—and healthy—to pray that God will help you want to want to forgive.

This is an honest acknowledgement of where you are if you don't want to forgive yet. Perhaps you are in a place where you need to think some more, to try to make sense of what happened. Or you are so hurt that you need to be able to hang on to the feeling of being a victim a little while longer. You know you don't want to stay in that place forever, but you are not ready to give it up just yet.

The healthy thing to do is to understand where you are, own up to it, and admit you are not quite ready to move on. At the same time, you can be open to a change in perspective where you could move from where you are now, to a place where you would want to want to forgive.

Once again I find myself in need of forgiving some big things. And once again this advice (I wish I could remember where I had read it all those years ago) has stood me in good stead. Getting to a point where you actually want to forgive is possibly just as hard as the actual forgiveness process itself.

The work of forgiveness 2

One thing I am learning is that forgiveness moves in and out of focus. At times I believe I have completed the work with someone. A while later I remember some new, different thing that must be examined, considered, and forgiven. Although this does not set me back to square one, it does teach me that forgiveness is a journey that's a bit longer and more complicated than you might expect.

I try not to get frustrated by this, and instead see it as the way forgiveness works.

It is as if I am a farmer in the northeast preparing a field. At first, many rocks turn up in the field. Each of them must be dug out, examined, and put aside—perhaps into a rock wall. After a while of this, the field has far fewer rocks and can be used to grow crops.

Yet rocks still remain. In fact, some of them would probably have laid buried if it were not for the earlier plowing and removal of other rocks. Occasionally the plow will hit them unexpectedly. What does the farmer do? Once again dig up the rock, examine it, and add it to the rock wall. If the rock is left where it is, sure, crops can be grown. But whenever it's planting or harvest time, that rock will impede the process. Better to dig it up, deal with it, and then move on.

Forgiveness is like that, I think. We are walking this journey with God, open to examining and dealing with any rocks he brings to our attention, in the timing he chooses.

The work of forgiveness 1

It's been nine months since the church I helped to lead closed its doors, and during this time I have been learning a lot about myself, my relationship to God, and where I need to get my head on straight before I attempt to join and serve in a new church.

Among other things, I realized I had to come to terms with the way our church slid into its death spiral, work out my feelings towards those primarily responsible for the loss, and, because this latest church failure was similar to previous church problems in my life, make sense of the larger picture I have witnessed.

Even with a whole lot of soul searching, it took me the better part of a year to start understanding:
How angry I was.
Why I was angry.
Who I was angry with.
Why I needed to go through a process of forgiveness before I could have anything to do with a new church.
What a process of forgiveness even looks like in my case.

I hope to share my forgiveness journey with you in installments over the next months.