Forgiveness
July 13th, 2006 (Overcoming Fear)
To be happy, you must overcome fear, and the best way to overcome fear is with love. Many people, though, cannot find their love. It exists, but it’s buried beneath a cold snowdrift of hate. It’s easy to hate. You can hate anything from death to terrorists to an unloving father, etc. but hate does terrible interior damage. It tarnishes love, hides love, and often even kills love.
People often think they can hate some people and love others fully, but it’s hard. Love and hate can’t live in the same heart. Think of the happiest people you know. They probably don’t love just their spouses and kids and hate a number of other people. I’ll bet they have a smile for everyone and something good to say about almost anyone. They probably have no enemies - and not much fear.
For the most part, hate is fear. We only hate the things we’re afraid of. When someone hurts us terribly, we often hate them for it. But we hate them mostly because we’re afraid they will hurt us again - either literally or in our minds, which replay the scene of hurt again and again. If we had the power to stop that person from hurting us ever again - even in our memories - our fear would fade, and our hate would again become just hurt, which can always heal.
We do have a way to stop people from hurting us again and again, even in our memories. It is forgiveness. Forgiveness is the blessing we bestow on not just those who have hurt us, but upon ourselves. Forgiveness knocks down the walls around love that hate can build. Forgiveness doesn’t alter what has happened. The memory remains; the hurt is unchanged. But forgiveness grants us new eyes, through the grace of love, that see the hurt in a different way.
Forgiveness isn’t forgetting. It’s just leaving behind your own hate and rising to the next level of life. It’s not about letting the other guy off the hook - it’s about letting yourself off the hook.
From a medical perspective, hate is a heavy burden, creating chronic over-stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, which contributes strongly to depressed immunity, insomnia, hypertension, muscle pain, colitis, ulcers, heart attack, stroke, memory loss, migraines, and impaired cognitive function. But the worst damage is to peace of mind. It’s impossible to hate and be happy at the same time. You don’t even need to tell someone you’ve forgiven them. In fact, you can forgive someone who’s dead. The important thing is just to get the hate out of your heart.