Dr. Arnold Burron
“If you can’t forget, have you really forgiven?”
A person loses a relative to a drunk driver. Every time he sits at the dinner table, the empty chair at the table is a reminder of a lost loved one.
Another person is blind–the victim of an assailant who attacked him because of his victim’s religion, the color of his skin, or maybe just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. How can the victim forget he is blind? Every time he opens his eyes to total darkness, he remembers.
But that does not mean that we can’t forgive. Even if we can’t forget, we can tell when we have forgiven someone. We have truly forgiven someone when we:
- Pass up the opportunity to “get even”—to do harm to the other person or to his reputation—even though we’d never be found out.
- Make a conscious decision never to dredge up the past, to the point of not bringing the incident up in conversation, not even to our closest confidante, unless it is for counseling or to help heal others.
- Make a conscious decision not to indulge ourselves by wallowing in our self-pity, deciding, instead, to thrust such feelings out of our minds immediately.
- Pray for the person whenever we think of his or her sin against us.
- And–here’s the hardest thing to do, but the thing God tells us we are called to do to receive His blessing: We know we’ve forgiven when we act upon the opportunity to do good to the person, even though no one will ever know, and even though the other person might still have hard feelings against us.
Only God can totally forget. Through Christ, He promises that He will “remember our sins no more,” and that, “…as far as the East is from the West, so far will He cast our sins from Him.” And it is because of His magnificent love for us, that we can forgive.
Even though we can’t forget.
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