Forgiveness, and Why I Love to Teach

Last night someone I know got openly upset at me, and I was a little bit shocked by the event. I’ve never had this person get upset at me before. I’m pretty easygoing and don’t tend to make my friends angry, so the few times that this has happened, I have felt more than a little hurt and upset. I reacted calmly, because that’s how I am, and promised to set things right, but inwardly I was absolutely fuming. I spent the next half hour thinking about how I should have responded to her with less apology and fewer excuses, and thinking about all the things she did that bothered me, and why her accusations were unfair, and how I was very aware of my own weaknesses and certainly didn’t need someone to remind me of them especially right now when I was feeling so stressed about my thesis, and so on and so on, and the whole time I knew full well that I was not reacting very well.

The truth was, my friend had struck a nerve because I knew I was in the wrong, shirking responsibility—there was too much truth in what she told me about myself.

At this same time, I was responsible for preparing a lesson for FHE, which was less than an hour away. I fixed myself dinner, ate, and attacked my dirty dishes (letting things crash around just a little too much), and then I went into my room and closed my door and took a deep breath and said a prayer for two things—first, that I would be able to rid myself of these feelings towards my friend, and second, that I would be able to find the appropriate topic for my FHE lesson. I then proceeded to flip through a book of teachings of Gordon B. Hinckley glancing at the topic headings searching for ideas, but nothing stood out to me. Sure, there’s plenty to be said about prayer or love or tolerance, but the topics all felt a little bit stale to me because I really didn’t have anything to say about any of them.

And then I found the book open to the short section on forgiveness. Of course. I really already knew that that’s what I was supposed to talk about. And thus both parts of my prayer were answered in one fell swoop.

The lesson turned out extremely well, actually. It wasn’t me—at least half the people there had something to say, and people in my group spent more time talking than I did. And I really did learn a lot from what they said. They had perspectives I had never thought of.

One comment stood out in particular. We had talked about forgetting, and how there are certain things you can’t forget and shouldn’t forget, and so I asked them what it really means if we’re supposed to forgive and forget (referring to one of the quotations from President Hinckley.* One of the girls responded that it’s not about forgetting that something happened. We’re usually going to remember incidents in which we were hurt by someone else. But even though we don’t forget the incident, we forget the hurt feelings, the anger, the resentment—all the negative feelings associated with that event. And instead we remember the event in a positive light. We remember what we learned from the experience, how we grew from the experience.

The more I think about her comment, the more meaning it has for me. Tonight, for instance, I’m quite proud of myself because in the end I reacted much better than I usually do to hurtful situations. I swallowed my pride and made a change that I was deeply tempted not to make just because my friend had said something to me. And because she had been dead on about some things that I have done recently and shouldn’t have done, I decided that it did me no good to sit there in resentment and refuse to acknowledge that she was actually in the right—I could learn from this experience and resolve to make some changes that I already knew I should make rather than letting the experience get in the way of making those changes. This could become the catalyst that I need to do what I should. Believe me, I have to swallow an awful lot of pride to let this become that catalyst because I’d rather do these things on my own initiative, not because someone else pointed out the need. But in the end, I think this could turn into a very positive experience, and maybe I’ll be able to look back on the incident and not remember the initial hurt that I felt because I managed to turn it into something good.

Something else someone said: We are told that the Lord will forgive whom He will forgive, and that we’re required to forgive all men. But the truth is that we don’t have the power to grant forgiveness. So what we’re doing and what the Lord is doing are essentially different. We are not forgiving in the same sense—rather we are repenting of our feelings of unforgiveness. I have never thought of it that way, but it really changes the way you think about forgiveness when you conceptualize it as repentance.

My favorite quotation in the whole section on forgiveness was the following, and I think it sums up my thoughts nicely, so I’ll end on that:

“If there be any who nurture in their hearts the poisonous brew of enmity toward another, I plead with you to ask the Lord for strength to forgive. This expression of desire will be of the very substance of your repentance. It may not be easy, and it may not come quickly. But if you will seek it with sincerity and cultivate it, it will come. And even though he whom you have forgiven continues to pursue and threaten you, you will know you have done what you could to effect a reconciliation. There will come into your heart a peace otherwise unattainable. That peace will be the peace of Him who said: ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses’ (Matthew 6:14-15).”

Food for thought…



*“So many of us are prone to say we forgive, when in fact we are unwilling to forget. If the Lord is willing to forget the sins of the repentant, then why are so many of us inclined to bring up the past again and again? Here is a great lesson we all need to learn. There is no true forgiveness without forgetting.”