Forgiveness

Yesterday at church, we had a guest speaker.  He is a lay leader from a church in the area.  He chose to speak about forgiveness, and as he got started I thought to myself "well this is certainly a topic I need to pay attention to."  I know that I am not a perfect person, and I can easily identify a laundry list of my own faults.  One of those faults happens to be holding onto to something that has angered me or hurt my feelings.  I have a really hard time with the part where you are supposed to forgive and not forget; I need to work on learning how to separate the two.

The part of his message that really spoke to me was a story about a man who had an estranged relationship with his parents and had come to our speaker for advice.  He basically had an attitude of "if they want to reconcile, then why haven't they come to me?"  Mr. Hand told him that he should accept that responsibility and contact his parents to initiate a reconcilitation.  He promptly did, and was able to repair his relationship with his parents before his mother passed away shortly thereafter.  Boy did I need to hear that!  That is an important lesson not only about forgiveness, but about relationships in general.  As Christians we believe "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," but when someone is not treating you as well as you would like, it's easy to lower your standards and not put out the effort that you should.  It got me to thinking that maybe I need treat others better than they treat me.  I just pray that God knows what is in my heart and helps me to be a more forgiving and kind person.