Forgiveness

I was running around the house a few minutes ago packing and cleaning. Zach and I are going to visit one of our grandmas this weekend! My phone rang and a much loved friend had called to say hello. You know those friends who you always pick up where you left off. It could be 5 days or 6 months since you last talked and it doesn't really make much difference. After the usually chatting of catching up we ended up talking relationships. This time about the ones that don't work out so well. Awwwww. Pain. Bitterness. Hurt.

We do have another option. It is slightly more scandalous and its ways are usually foreign to us. Usually it hurts our pride or our own self image, but in the end we win. The crazy thing about forgiveness, the part we miss the most is that it requires more of us than we realize. To truly forgive, we must be able to do it before one say's they are sorry. To FOR- (as in before) Give. Tough stuff*.

Anyway I thought I would share this...











*Actually it is so tough that when I Google-d 'forgiveness' to see if I had an validity in breaking it down as I just did (for the record I didn't find much (ha) there were books, seminars, classes, ect. on how to learn to forgive. Crazy! We are pretty bad at it as humans.

For the philosophical/spiritual part of this blog: In the atonement theory of the cross, the demonstration of Jesus dying shows he did such a thing even before so much of the world had come into existence.