Forgiveness

There will be times in your marriage when you need to forgive and when you feel you need to seek forgiveness. As a married couple, you can be involved in creative ways to solve what seems to be impossible situations. When you forgive your spouse it starts a new beginning at that moment in your marriage.

Hurts and offenses will exist, but when you forgive you refuse to let them become anchors which keep you from moving forward. The following quote was written by David Augsburger and describes forgiveness so well:

Forgiveness take place when love accepts – deliberately – the hurts and abrasions of life and drops all charges against the other person. Forgiveness means accepting your spouse when both of you know he or she has done something quite unacceptable.

Forgiveness is smiling silent love to your partner when the justifications for keeping an insult or injury alive is on the tip of your tongue, yet you swallow it. Not because you have to, but you want to, to keep peace, and because you want to, to make peace.

Forgiveness is not acceptance given “on the condition” that the other become acceptable. Forgiveness is given freely out of the keen awareness that the forgiver also has a need of constant forgiveness. Which will be daily.

Forgiveness exercises God’s strength to love and receives the other person without any assurance of complete restitution and making of amends. (This is hard, but true forgiveness).

Forgiveness is a relationship between equals who recognize their need of each other to share and share alike. Each needs the other’s forgiveness, acceptance, and each other.

So…….before God, each of you drops all charges, refutes all self-justification, and says, “I forgive you.” And it can be “seventy times seven,” as Jesus said. (A few word changes by me, with Quite Times for Couples, p. 274).

Sherry