Simple but often difficult

• Tweet
• Email

So what is the answer to dealing with hurt?? Well it is summed up in one word, forgiveness.

I’ve worked for over 25 years now with people who have been crippled by unforgiveness and seen so many of them completely set free from all kinds of dysfunction as they embrace the freedom that forgiveness brings.

A friend of mine emailed me about a 20/20 story just this week that apparently highlighted this very issue. His comments were:

I don’t suppose you saw 20/20 on TV on Thursday night? There was a segment there on a family in America who had an opportunity in court to address their daughter’s (sister’s) convicted murderer. The murderer was the father of the victim’s two year old child

The victim’s sister expressed her hatred, and her inability to forgive the killer. The killer was expressionless and made no eye contact

The mother, with extreme difficulty, managed to express her desire to the killer to forgive him. An amazing achievement! She even managed to elicit some slight expression and emotion from the killer!

The next clip was an interview with the daughter saying how she felt empty and unsatisfied with her face-to-face.

In comparison the final shots were of a mother who had taken over the parenting of the orphaned grandchild, had moved on, and was able to start enjoying her life.

What she managed to do must have been so difficult, but the outcome was so satisfying and worthwhile!….

You see forgiveness works, no need to spiritualize it or anything, it just works.

I ran a video blog series on this issue, you can watch the main ones by clicking below

Unforgiveness
Getting ready to forgive
Coming to grips with forgiveness
Forgiveness continued
Forgiving ourselves

For those of you who don’t do video lets start to look at what forgiveness is and more importantly what it isn’t so that you can begin your journey if you need to.

Firstly understand that unforgiveness hurts one person, YOU!!
I have worked with people who have harboured unforgiveness against people who have been dead for years. Do the dead people feel bad for what they did?? No they are dead. The only life being affected by unforgiveness is the victim.

So understand that first off. We need to learn to forgive for our own sake, not the other persons. In fact in most cases the person we are hating has no idea that they even did anything wrong.

The second thing to understand is that forgiving someone is not saying that what they did was ok, or something that should be forgotten about. Forgiving them is actually removing the power that they currently have over you by releasing them from our judgment.

You won’t get excited about this idea till you get to the end of the process but trust me, you will never be the same again.

So tonight just think about this introduction and tomorrow we’ll get into more detail.

If you want some comprehensive teaching to walk right through this process I taught it at Behind Closed Doors, available on DVD HERE

Stay Safe ~ Dean Letfus @ www.massiveaction.co.nz