Confess – Repent – Forgive

Yesterday I wrote on the wounds of the heart as being a major cause of the suffering that goes on in our world.  I offered spiritual discipline as a means of healing the wounds of the heart.  Today I want to offer two spiritual tools that were essential in my healing.  Love and forgiveness are the most powerful tools, that I have found with heart healing power.  We have all wounded others, whether intentional or unintentional.  Whoever wounded us had to be wounded themselves.  Almost like cookies on a computer, wounds leave a reference point on the hard drive of our hearts, minds, and even our bodies.  Just as the cache of our computers must be cleared to keep old websites from accessing our computers, our hearts, minds, and bodies must be cleared in order to keep old hurts to keep from having continual access to our hearts.  Forgiveness is a way of clearing the cache in our hearts and love heals the pain and reprograms us for positive heart health.  This does not mean we always forget the past, but forgiveness with love makes the story more powerful and allows all parties to have a future without continual strife.  Wherever there has been brokenness, between people or nations, we need to find a way to own our part, ask for forgiveness, forgive, and live without malice going forward. 

In order to forgive, it helped me to recognize that I had been forgiven, and that I could only be free to live freely when I forgave those who had hurt or offended me.  The discipline of forgiveness requires more than the simple statement of “I forgive you.”  In fact, it is not a statement at all.  For deep and hidden pain, it requires a journey into the pain of the body, the thoughts of the mind, and the hurt of the heart to understand what, and who, you must forgive.  Love and forgiveness go together.  When I experienced the love of God in the place of my pain, I learned to forgive the person I thought was responsible for the hurt so that they too could experience the love of God.  If I do not want them to experience the love of God, I have not truly forgiven them.  Self-examination is a daily discipline that enables us to understand our hearts and minds better.  If we are going to be successful in saving our marriages, our families, our nations, and our world, we must first begin with a daily examination of ourselves.