F – Forgive and stop looking at the Past

I have chosen 26 Tips for a Happy Married Life as my theme for A-Z April challenge, 2016.

Today the word is

Forgive past mistakes stop looking at the Past

Forgiveness is a beautiful quality that makes us divine, as the saying goes “to err is human but to forgive is divine” so very true. Humanly speaking it is not easy to forgive and worse still to forget; as our mind remembers every details of all the hurts and situations, the words spoken, the emotions that is attached giving us meaning and making us relive another 100 times throughout our lives; we remember childhood hurts, persons who were mean to us, insulted us, manipulated and exploited us.. 

We never forget them and whenever we recall everything comes back fresh as though it happened yesterday. So the first rule is learn to forgive oneself, it’s a loving act; no matter what is been our past, it’s over and we must release and move on, without letting us control our present.

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In a marital relationship forgiveness plays an important role and life becomes difficult when we store all the old issues, it weighs us down hindering our progress. The simple thing to do is to make a decision to forgive and take each day as a fresh new blank page. It is not very easy to do but definitely not impossible. I am grateful to God for the learnings I had in my early youth and forgiveness was something that I struggled with. 

Then in a prayer service I heard the preacher talk about the importance of forgiveness and encouraged all the youth to make a decision to forgive and experience healing of our past wounds and hurts. So then on I made attempts to forgive, of course I could not forget… and it took a lot of time to let go and release the past hurts and wounds. 

The early days of our marriage was difficult to practice forgiveness and there were moments of bitterness, anger, irritations mostly because of the influence of the third parties who were insecure, losing their hold and may be could not accept the new entry in the family. I also found the importance practising forgiveness of self, not to live in regrets. Books like “you can heal yourself” like Louise Hay and a lot more spiritual books helped me to look at forgiveness of self as a positive quality of being kind to self.

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With a lot of patience, prayers and perseverance I learnt the hard way to practice and leave the past behind. Once I made the decision to move on and not to turn back, accepting and forgiving my husband became an auto response. Joyce Meyer, a famous preacher says that “Forgiveness is not a feeling it’s a decision we make because we want to do what’s right before God.

It’s a quality decision that won’t be easy and it may take time to get through the process, depending on the severity of the offense.”Finally to forgive means to understand even oneself says Alexander Chase.

Do you forgive? what do you do when you are hurt ?