If you really forgave what would happen in your marriage?  Well, if you forgave a single incident or event would it really stick?  Would it really matter in your marriage?  Would it have an effect?

How about this.

What if you really forgave?  Forgiving single and isolated incidents almost has a taste of superiority to it.  You have to ask yourself if your forgiving there really draws you back to your spouse and reconnects you or does it just ingratiate them to you temporarily until the next offense.  Then the accounting of forgiving begins.  Reminding them how many times you gave them a break.

You want things to be better with your spouse, more connected, more happy.  Becoming a forgiving person is something we all really long for – to be able to go off duty, not keep score, to really see and address the wrong with authenticity and directness but with the intent of forgiveness.

What Forgiveness is not

1.  Forgiveness does not fear.  Being afraid to face what is really going on in your relationship and labelling it “forgiveness” will not remove the problem but likely make it worse.  Chaos, confusion, and deception breed in the fertile ground of fear.  One way to test this is to see if your forgiveness brings more clarity to a situation or more confusion.

2.  Forgiveness is not isolated.  A characteristic of abuse is isolating the person so they have no social support from family or friends.  If you have something to forgive I would think your close family and friends probably know and understand.  But if you have been isolated this causes more problems that forgiveness will not solve.

3.  Forgiveness is not waiting.  What are you waiting for?  If forgiveness is in your hand what is keeping you from extending it?  Or is it really a conditional forgiveness and so you’re waiting for the conditions to be met before you forgive?

What Forgiveness is

1.  Forgiveness is eye-to-eye contact.  It is direct.  We know so many things by looking people in the eye.  This seems to address the wrong as well as the sincerity to let it go.

2.  Forgiveness is connected.  It reconnects you with the one who hurt you.  It hits the restart button.  However, some people do have trouble accepting forgiveness.  But on your end it can help you love better.  The other part of connected here is that anyone else familiar with the situation is often positively affected when you forgive.

3.  Forgiveness is active.  Go.  Forgive.  It ends the brooding.  The resentment.  The past.  It restarts today.  Somehow there is this internal emotional, mental, spiritual, physical feeling of building up such that you can’t stand the issue anymore and you must let go of resentment and go and forgive.

What could really happen in your marriage if you started becoming a forgiving person? 

On Wednesday:  What would happen in your marriage if you understood?