Forgiveness is a Leap of Faith

There is something about experiencing abuse at the hands of another human that changes parts of your core identity. Your trust gets shattered to pieces, you sink into constant self-doubt as you’re threatened to stay quiet, and you begin to know a shame so deep, you forget that you were the innocent one. But there’s a feeling that remains inside of you long after the damage has been done, and you’ve tried to bury it. Sometimes you don’t even realize it’s still there, that my friend is unforgiveness.

I’ve walked this path before. Even after the fact, it’s like your memory is a record player that can’t move past that hurt, that event, that cruelty. I know that I’m not the only one who has seen the bitter side of someone else’s sin, and whether you have known pain through verbal, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, I hope you can find hope in these words today and that they move you to soul freeing forgiveness.

If I can be candid, I believe there’s many things a child should never be exposed to. As children we assume that the ‘grown ups’ around us would keep us safe, that’s how we’re wired, but this wasn’t the case for me. My childhood was quickly sped up when the verbal, physical and emotional abuse began and the molestation encounters entered.

Years later, I’ve tried to convince myself that I had forgiven my offender, I would try to nod in agreement with those who spoke well of him after his death, but I realized that my forgiveness was yet a far way to go. I know that death is meant to feel tragic, but there was a sense of relief inside of me that day, and although he was gone, the pain he caused me still remained with me, and I began grappling with the pain and unforgiveness I had carried all this time.

Forgiveness is one of those sensitive areas that we don’t want anyone poking at, to forgive feels like going against our very own nature. We cling to unforgiveness as a way to take back our life, as a weapon against those who hurt us, but instead it spreads like poison inside ourselves.

God has had to teach me through that trauma that forgiveness is a leap of faith. Whenever you take a leap of faith, you’re doing something even though you have no guarantee that it will succeed, by definition it’s a belief in something that is uncertain. It doesn’t always feel safe, and you have no idea if it will help, but forgiveness takes the band aid off of a bruise and tends to it to protect it from further complications.

One of the hardest things to get past when we can’t forgive others, is the question, ‘why should I forgive this person?’ What happens when our offender never owns up to the hurt they caused, and like mine, never will get the opportunity to? If we cannot trust in others to move along the process, and seek to mend the pain they’ve caused, what can we look to as our unwavering standard that leads us to forgiveness?

We have to stare at our gracious God. There is a quote by C.S Lewis that says, ‘To be Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you’. That digs deep at a nerve, and without a posture of humility, we will look right past the beauty of the Gospel, that first sets us free.

The Gospel is what sets any victim or any offender free, because in perspective it shows that we all are offenders, we sin, we hurt others, but most importantly we offend God, because of our sin – ‘As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one’ (Romans 3:10). So how can we, the hurting ones come to grasp with forgiving the hurts that we simply can’t forget because of their impact on us? We can only truly understand what it means to forgive someone when we understand what we have been forgiven of and allow that gratefulness to overflow to the offenses of others. 

Now I find myself looking back and I see the journey, I see how far He has brought me, and how close those moments brought me to Him. I never used to understand why I had to go through what I went through, when I heard people say that God would use my hurt for good, my initial thought was, ‘why should I have experienced this hurt to begin with?’ But I finally understand.

The truth is that I can see how my steps were ordered by God from birth, and if I didn’t go through those things I wouldn’t know God the way I do today. I wouldn’t have the intimate relationship that I have with Him now, and it didn’t come easy, it took many nights filled with tears and doubts. But I have started to see that there was purpose in my pain, and God has not allowed for it to go to waste.   

If I could choose to erase those parts I would, but I’ve found that I serve a sovereign God, who has graced me with His endless mercies, not once, but a million times, when I did nothing to deserve it. In the midst of it I learned forgiveness, that forgiveness is a leap of faith, you might not always feel ready or feel like offering it, but it is in that leap that you will find freedom and God’s plan to work inside of you and through your story.