We all have stories. Stories that aren’t fun, bring up painful memories and make us wish we’d never retold them. They’ve been pushed down, shoved to the back of our minds and left to gather dust. We often feel like that is the best method with those painful points in our past. It means we’re not constantly staring at them, we don’t fret over them day-by-day and we consider our intentional ignoring of those issues to be a small victory.

When we ignore those issues, they seem to go away, don’t they? When we press them down or shove them to the darkest corners of our minds, we feel like we’ve gained some modicum of control over them, and that, too, feels like a small win. When it comes to painful memories, hurts and emotional wounds, this is often what we consider the ‘best case scenario.’ Out of sight — out of mind. We feel like -we- have won & we like it.

But in reality, we’re still giving up emotional real estate to something that doesn’t deserve it. We’re allowing a wound to fester & a rust spot to slowly corrode a bigger hole in the protective plating around our heart. The ‘set it and forget it’ model of forgiveness only prepares us for return visits and deeper, exaggerated wounds later down the line.

Imagine with me that you are a solider for the Union in the American Civil War. You believe in human dignity, you believe that every man, woman and child should be free and considered as equals with their pigment-diverse kin all around the world. That’s a good place to be. But you took a musket ball to the thigh sometime ago, on a dark night during a particularly difficult volley with the enemy.

You let the field medic poke and prod with his finger, but he couldn’t quite get to the fragments in your leg…so you concentrated on healing the open wound, and tried to let life go on with this new addition to your person. What you didn’t understand is that you have allowed a dangerous piece of lead (which is inherently harmful) and the germs from the medic and a few other people all gain entrance into your wounded body…

You see where I’m going here?

Rot, infection, gangrene all have the potential to set in and you may lose more than just your leg.

This is what unforgiveness does to us. It rots us, eats at us, weakens us…from the inside out.

This is why it is so important to let forgiveness work itself out in us, prayerfully seeking God’s wisdom and strength in the process. God’s grace over us was never meant to let us retain those hurts. Since we have been forgiven, we should also forgive…and for so many good reasons. Forgiveness is healthy. Forgiveness is God honoring. Forgiveness leads us away from that lingering corruption and into the pathways and rhythms of grace. And that is a much better place to be, forgiven, forgiving and free!