Hardships That Hang On

The core of God’s plan is to rescue us from sin and self-centeredness.  Suffering — especially the chronic kind — is God’s choicest tool to accomplish this.  It is a long process.  But it means I can accept my paralysis as a chronic condition.  When I broke my neck, it wasn’t a jigsaw puzzle I had to solve fast or a quick jolt to get me back on track.  My paralyzing accident was the beginning of a lengthy process of becoming like Christ.

— Joni Eareckson Tada, Pearls of Great Price, February 17 entry

Worth the Effort

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

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

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

Happiness

Happiness is not squandered when it comes to people long bereft of it.  They know what to do — hold it gently like a small bird, amazed the bird came to alight, and be pleased to let it stay as long as it will.

— Tracy Groot, Madman, p. 159

Forgiveness and Feelings

But forgiveness can’t be proven by our feelings, any more than it can be motivated or empowered by them.  Forgiveness is a choice.  And feelings often aren’t.  It’s quite possible to forgive someone in totally the right way — God’s way — and still have thoughts flash across your mind that completely contradict the decision you made….

But that doesn’t negate what you’ve done.  It simply gives you an opportunity to let Him rule over those emotions, to stay the course and keep on forgiving — by faith.

— Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Forgiveness, p. 171-172

Book Bliss

We know that we do not need personal books — least of all librarian book collectors — but there is something about the way they speak to us unopened and spring to life when opened.  It is good to sit at home in peace surrounded by the books that mean so much to me, even if neither utilitarianism nor rationalism can tell me why.

— Michael Gorman, Our Singular Strengths:  Meditations for Librarians, p. 142