Thinkin’ about forgiveness and giving up resentment

by Karin on January 18, 2007 · 2 comments

in Forgiveness, Just thinking, Prayer, Quotations, Relationships, Resentment

I woke the other morning thinking about forgiveness and asking/praying/thinking about how to give up any resentments that were lurking around...and trying to get a handle on it.

I've heard it said that forgiveness is being willing to give up your own idea of retribution and leave it to God.

I was thinking of a section in the popular book by Joel Osteen Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential. He speaks about a man whose hands were crippled with arthritis. Then the next time they saw him, his hands were perfect. The man told Joel's father that he had taken to heart a sermon by Joel's father about forgiveness. He began to eliminate resentment from his life, and one by one his fingers straightened out.

That was such a dramatic healing to me!

It's fairly easy sometimes to see the need for it other people's lives, and also to see wonderful examples of it in life, such as with the Amish community's handling of the shootings that took place there. It is not so easy to root it out in my own life or even to recognize when it is hanging on, especially since I'm not the kind of person to hold onto vengeful thinking. I generally do let go of it, but I suppose memories hang on, at the least, though I don't call them up very often.

I must have been still thinking about this quote:

Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy. Milton Erickson, M.D.

because I put the two things together with a Bible quote:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. KJV

Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don't get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes. The Message

"So don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today. New Living Translation
Matt 6: 34

What I thought in a brief moment was that some of the painful things in life are those things that cause us resentment...and our responsibility is to give it up as best we can, to take the side of joy. There's enough evil in a day not to bring in yesterday's too. Or, to put it another way, today may have little evil per se, but we are re-living some bad times if we hang onto them with resentments. To have the most joy, we have to give up thinking about or reliving the painful moments.

Ah, but it ain't easy.

Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace. - Buddha

All ideas welcome!

Karin

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

wanda January 19, 2007 at 6:01 pm

the best practical, in-depth book I’ve read on how to forgive is by janis Spring. “How Can I Forgive You: the courage to forgive, the freedom not to.”

It’s a challenging process that she suggests.

wanda

Karin January 19, 2007 at 8:43 pm

That sounds like an interesting book! I hope you will tell us more.

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