Empowering and enabling functional forgiveness

Photo by Raul Varzar on Unsplash

Imagine fellow human beings not being the real enemy, but the force of disconnection they avow; forgiveness is a power we employ when it functions for us to reconnect us to what is good.

Unforgiveness is a force of disconnection.

Unforgiveness is a vacuum
where goodness seems non-existent.

Unforgiveness stifles us because it’s a taking away without replacement. It’s a void. It causes us to stumble because our thoughts and heart are dominated by that which takes energy without giving back.

Evil always takes away,
whereas goodness always adds.

We know these things in the simple act of attempting to engage in a social gathering, especially when someone is there that we have a patchy history with. If our thoughts are dominated by the fear in unforgiveness, we’re disconnected with others in a way that we let those thoughts govern our behaviour. We shrink or are moody. Yet, if our thoughts see the fear, and ameliorate it courageously with the knowledge that connection adds power and purpose, even in those moments of engaging with the person we have history with, we have the words and the poise for it. We present the goodness of God on those occasions, because God gives us the power to be straight up when we’re honestly focused on goodness instead of evil. The force of evil cannot get close. The light voids the darkness.

Suddenly there is something beyond
the hopelessness of unforgiveness.

Most people desiring peace in their heart desire a way to functionally forgive the perpetrator for the hurt they bear. They just struggle to attain the way of it. Some want that peace, but they insist on retaining their anger toward the perpetrator.

We can’t have it both ways. We will either surrender the negative energy that saps our heart at the level of our thinking or we will retain it and get nowhere.

Forgiveness literally means to let go,
yet we quickly learn that in the letting go,
we must grasp something afresh —
that is the light that Christ alone
offers us via the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is about seeking connection
to that which brings goodness and life,
whilst binding and breaking those bonds
of disconnection that bring only death.

Forgiveness, for it to be what it is, and that is a process of letting go, needs to be functional — something we can do, and actually do.

Do not simply disconnect from the person who hurt you,
but find ways to reconnect to the goodness in life.

None of us ought to imagine that any of this process of letting go is easy. It can be the hardest thing we ever do, but there is a way that works, and that is what I term ‘functional forgiveness’, in that it is something you do and not simply think about.