The Benefits of Forgiveness

Much like walking barefoot through grass, a Johns Hopkins study concluded forgiveness lowers the risk of heart attack; improves cholesterol levels and sleep; and reduces pain, blood pressure, anxiety, depression, and stress. Forgiveness grounds us to love. And it’s catching, too.

Your kids see the truth on your face. They hear it in every word you speak. It’s our job to overcome hopelessness, bitterness, and despair, or risk passing it on. Our healing is their inoculation. When we give ourselves access to peace, we give it to them.

God Teaches Us to Forgive

Like every loving parent who says Don’t run into the street or No, you can’t have chocolate cake right before bed or Wash your hands before supper, God tells us what to do with our best interests at heart.

Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

It’s as foundational as Don’t run into the street. God knows what we need to thrive because He loves us—even when we tantrum, or lie, or behave badly. His witness of us never wavers. Neither does His love or His help.

Seven Steps: The Practice of Forgiveness

1. Interrupt your current emotional state. Recognize you—and your kids—deserve better.

Stop what you’re doing and look around. See the bars of your own cage: the anger, the need for vengeance, or the way we repeatedly tell the story of our short stick. Max Lucado said, “Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realizing you were the prisoner.”

2. Take a deliberate step forward, and then take that same step tomorrow, and the day after.

Forgiveness is not a “one-and-done” experience. It’s an ongoing and daily choice to transfer your need for justice into God’s hands completely, trusting Him as the righteous judge. The author Sue Monk Kidd wrote: “Some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is painful. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s an evolution of the heart.”

3. Accept the apology you may never receive.

Your grace does not need to be reciprocated. Stop standing in the way of your own healing by needing acknowledgment, apology, or amends from the person who wronged you. Leave it to Mark Twain to turn this into poetry: “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

4. Pray for the offending person.

While this seems impossible, think of it as asking God’s Spirit to work in you as you release the process into His hands. “Lord, help me to be willing to pray for this person” is a good place to start. Be patient with yourself as God is patient with you. Writer David Small put this beautifully: “To understand somebody else as a human being is about as close to real forgiveness as one can get.”

5. In the math of tallying up life’s challenges, don’t forget to count your blessings—however they found you.

Acknowledge the gifts in your life with thankfulness. Your children, inner strength, supportive friends and family, moments of random kindness. This is the wellspring from which you can offer grace to those who have harmed you. Dick Van Dyke said, “Just knowing you don’t have the answers is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness, and an eagerness to learn—and those are all good things.”

6. With humility, submit and surrender to God.

Humility helps us remember we’ve all had episodes of being less than we should be. We need to be forgiven as much as we need to offer it to others. With humility, surrender the outcome—whatever will be, will be— trusting God to determine that as only He can do. Author Elisabeth Elliot wrote, “If with courage and joy, we pour ourselves out for Him and for others for His sake, it is not possible to lose, in any final sense, anything worth keeping. We will gain everything worth having.”

7. Take care of yourself by grounding in God’s creation.

Reset your emotions and your capacity by seeking fresh air regularly, giving yourself the embrace of nature. Even the simple parks and sunrises of any town or city. Go wherever you can hear more birdsong than sirens and plug into the source. “The cortex—the conscious mind— is the enemy,” says motivational speaker and athlete Wim Hof. “We are estranged from our own deeper physiology because we are no longer in contact with nature. You have a depth within yourself which needs to be stimulated. If it doesn’t get stimulated it becomes weaker, like a muscle. Nature polishes the diamond of the truth.”