![]() ![]() I know the way I feel is wrong, and I’ve tried so hard to forgive him, but I just can’t and I don’t know what to do. But I know I have to forgive him if I want to be right with God, and I do want to be right with God, but it’s so hard, because I feel like I can’t bring myself to forgive him. My father (or uncle, brother, or some other male family member) sexually abused me as a child. The conversation usually goes something like this: Numerous times over the years I have had to walk sexually abused girls and women through a process of deconstructing and then reconstructing their notions of love and forgiveness, in order to liberate their minds and give them the courage to create necessary distance between themselves and their abusers. We have so sentimentalized love in general and forgiveness in particular, that it takes an act of intellectual intentionality to define love and forgiveness in terms of acting in the best interest of the violated and the violator. In fact, you can forgive someone, and call the police on them, press charges, and put them behind bars. You can forgive someone and not allow them into your house or to babysit your children or to have access to your finances or to drive your car or … well, you get the picture. You can forgive someone and not have Tuesday night dinners with them anymore. You can forgive someone and not like them. You can forgive somebody while at the same time severing your relationship with them for their best good and your own. What forms might that accountability take? Here are a few examples: From a biblical perspective, it is possible to forgive a person for a violation and yet hold them accountable by means of tangible actions. Positive feelings may or may not attend forgiveness, but they are not forgiveness itself. What, then, is forgiveness, if it is not a state of positive feelings?īy contrast, from an ancient Hebrew perspective, forgiveness has little to do with the way a violated person feels about the person who has violated them. Consequently, we see disastrous relational wreckage everywhere we turn. It would be difficult to conceive of a more disastrous way to live life. Offer a prayer and hold onto your heart.įorgiveness is often misunderstood because we live in a hyper-sentimentalized culture in which actions are expected to follow wherever feelings lead.
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