You are not bad

You are not bad or wrong if you can not forgive in a way as others imagine it should look like. You have a right to take time and find ways that will help you to consider forgiving on your terms. Some people will pressure you because they don’t know or understand what’s happening in you or around you.

What is needed first is to trust that when you surrender your right for justice that can not be given, it will not be trotted on, dismissed, omitted, passed by, and mostly, forgotten. It’s not about making others see how heroic you are but about you agreeing that the need for fairness and justice don’t just have to disappear but they need to be surrendered into the hands of Jesus who holds you in the wounds of His Body and speaks your name daily with every drop of His blood dripping down, until you can trust that His suffering is real and redemptive. Not just some illusory, sentimental or symbolic stuff brought in a piety that is foreign to you.

That trust will lead to releasing the tension in your memories, in your body and it will start creating a space for your emotions to be safely experienced, named, and released. Grief opens up. Jesus heals. You trust and start experiencing the will to forgive. Maybe not the whole thing. Maybe only a part. Maybe a small part. But you don’t feel or sense or think with such intensity about that part anymore. And it’s not because you ‘worked’ so hard but because you were given and allowed grace to flow low. As low as possible.

God will never pressure you to forgive. He will love you into it. He will help you because He is constant, safe, deliberate in love and always ready to fill that inch of trust you will give Him with his promise of stability and care.