As you know I was wronged by someone last weekend and wrote about it a few posts back. I/We have been approached with an apology in asking for forgiveness to reconcile the relationship that has been damaged by insecurities. Firstly, I'm impressed that my reading audience, including myself, correctly diagonsed the sympton from which she suffers. Great job team! ☻
It is not uncommon for people, including me, to struggle with forgiveness. The moment I learned about the apology I immediated felt resentment thinking how angry I felt during the time and how easy it now seems for the person in question to send a text and ask to be forgiven with hopes of meeting again in the future. Forgiveness does not come easy for most of us and certainly not me in this case, especially when the wrong is done with precise intention. Our natural instinct as humans with free will is to recoil in self-protection when we've been injured. We don't naturally overflow with mercy, grace and forgiveness when we've been wronged even though we may know that is what God would want from us.
Now the question on my mind is if forgiveness is a conscious choice, a physical act involving the will, or is it a feeling, an emotional state of being? Should we be expected to immediately erase the slate and start anew because we call ourselves Christians and that is what the Bible dictates? I'm wondering now about the notion of forgiveness and whether it is just an emotion state of being that you arrive to once you have truly resolved the matter within yourself or if it is a conscious choice that you tell yourself to forgive the person and move on from there.
What do you think????
