You Always Have the Choice to Forgive.

Forgiveness, Relationships 0

Remember that when you have a committed love partner, you always have the choice to forgive….

If you approach your relationship with the understanding that things will sometimes go wrong and that you are ready with forgiveness, you will become a more powerful partner.  As you forgive, you begin to reframe the way you discuss your relationship.  You will find yourself telling stories of heroic understanding and unruffled self-acceptance instead of stories of grief and resentment.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 76

A Reservoir of Love

Children, Forgiveness, Love, Relationships 0

There may be some people in your life for whom you feel such love that you are already at stage four:  openhearted and ready to forgive.  Many of you, for instance, already feel forgiving toward your children.  Forgiving them does not mean that you approve of all that they do, but rather that you can acknowledge they have hurt you without making them your enemy.  You have a reservoir of love to draw upon that allows you to forgive them.  Once you forgive your children, you can let the insults go and work with them to resolve the problems.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 75

New Thinking

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I want to waste as little of my life as possible in the pain caused by anger and hurt.  I want to react well when things do not go the way I want in my marriage.  This decision will allow me to forgive myself, forgive my partner, and even forgive life itself when necessary….

Dealing with relationships is a challenge.  I want to be a survivor and not a victim.  Each hurtful situation challenges my determination to live as fully and lovingly as possible.  I accept the challenges that life sends my way.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 64

Your Options

Forgiveness, Relationships 0

You have the choice to forgive or not to forgive, and no one can force you to do either.  If you want to forgive your wife, no one can stop you, no matter how poorly she may have acted.  The choice to forgive or not is similar to the choices you make about how much anger you will express and how long you will hold a grudge.

Let’s take this idea of choice one step further.  If you have the option to forgive, then this suggests that you also have the option to take offense or not in the first place.  One of the ways to hasten forgiveness is to take offenses less personally.  I firmly believe that relationships would improve if people chose to take offense less often.  Being more tolerant of your partner’s bad behavior would do a lot to make him or her feel more accepted and loved.  This in turn would make your partner more likely to treat you with kindness.  You have a choice in how you react to your partner’s bad behavior.  Surely it makes sense to try to be more accepting and less prone to offense if doing so decreases the number of times you actually have to forgive your partner.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 57

Worth the Effort

Forgiveness, Marriage 0

I hope that you also can learn to be more forgiving of your partner.  Doing this will be worth whatever effort you have to make to get there.  Even if you are able to develop a forgiving nature, however, you will still have specific offenses to work through.  But being forgiving will reduce the number of obstacles you create in your marriage and improve the pleasure of the time you spend with your loved one.

No matter how perfectly loving your relationship is, your partner will do irritating things and make choices that are potentially dangerous to your relationship.  Inevitably you will have to make decisions that may require difficult conversations.  Forgiveness will help you have more peaceful conversations and help make the difficult decisions easier to think out.  Both situational forgiveness (forgiving a specific act) and dispositional forgiveness (becoming a more forgiving person) can be practiced with specific techniques for getting over wounds and moving on.  Most of the time the health of our marriages requires only that we be more forgiving of who our partner is.  Some of our partner’s actions may require specific acts of forgiveness because the resulting wound is so deep that the grief takes time to heal.  The power of forgiveness is such that even situational forgiveness is easier the more forgiving we are in general.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 56

The Love We Crave

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Forgiving a specific wrong reduces the stress and hostility that stems from an unresolved hurt, but becoming a truly forgiving husband or wife creates a marriage that surpasses what you ever hoped it would be.  When you decide to really forgive your partner, you create an opening into a deep and sustaining love.  Experiencing and giving that deep love is what we all crave when we enter into a relationship.  That love is what we deny ourselves when we spend our lives criticizing our lovers and complaining about all the ways in which they do not measure up to our standards….

Love is what happens when you stop creating stress by arguing about the imperfections of the person you married.  That does not mean you like everything your spouse does or that you don’t talk to your spouse about things.  You are still going to have specific problems that require forgiveness, but thankfully those will be rare.  Forgiveness allows the love to flourish and to not be corroded by your resentments and complaints.

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 51-52

The Goal of Forgiveness

Forgiveness, God, Gratitude 0

The ultimate goal of forgiveness, just as the ultimate goal of our whole lives should be, is to bring glory and honor to God.

Forgiveness in the life of a believer showcases the astounding, redemptive heart of God.  It puts on display the riches of His abundant mercy and His amazing grace, for all to see….

Forgiveness is not just an act of obedience for obedience’s sake.  Yes, we are commanded to forgive.  And yes, we who have been forgiven so much certainly have no right to be debt collectors.  But more than an obligation, forgiveness is a high calling — an opportunity to be part of something eternal, to shower back our gratitude to the One who forgave us everything….

Think of it as an offering, a sacrifice, a love gift to God . . . for Him and Him alone.  If He adds to the blessing by causing our forgiveness to be of help to us or others, so much the better.  But to know that He is pleased and praised — that is reason and reward enough.

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 214-215