Forgiving is the Hardest Thing You Will Ever Do

As a professional Christian mediator for over 20 years, I have walked with many people through dark seasons of life.

You can call it depression. Despair. The Black Dog. A valley. A dark night of the soul. Choose your term. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it hurts to live. People can’t breathe. There is daily weeping, wailing. Sometimes people freeze. Just lie there day after day. Not moving. Incapable of distraction. Exhausted but unable to sleep. Thoughts spiraling down and down.

Do you know people who are suffering like this? Maybe it is your pastor in a huge church conflict. A friend. Relative. You.

Over time, if you love people, you will either walk with them through seasons of suffering, or you will abandon and neglect them. I pray that you choose the former. Have real relationships. Know them well enough to rally and intervene. To care.

I have asked questions like these in person (though often depressed people begin to avoid relational interactions); on the phone walking through a grocery store when I heard a desperation in my friend’s voice as she was just a few days post labor and delivery and I knew that she must not be left alone with the newborn–she was a danger to herself and her child; she required a few days of hospitalization); and so, so many women at retreats and conferences and online that I long ago lost count:

• Are you bathing? Eating? Tell me about your sleep patterns.
• What aspects of this might be spiritual? Habitual? Sin-related?
• Do we need to get you to medical assistance?
• I am going to call you this afternoon and you MUST pick up. You must. If you do not, I will leave work and come to your home. You do not have the option of not picking up.

 
Some people have chemical/genetic predispositions to depression. Relational breaches, especially in our closest relationships (family, church, ministry) cause deep, deep hurt. Temptation to bitterness. An internal screaming of anger and rage in response to betrayal. Shock. Fear. Frustration. Not seeing a way out. Not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel—or if there is a light, it’s a train coming down the tracks to run over you again.

Why do things get so hard? It’s simple: forgiveness is a death. Bearing with is hard. Choosing to risk and love (which are one in the same) means that sometimes, we will be hurt. Friends will love us, but they will love us imperfectly. And then we have to choose:

1. Pull back from all relationships? Stop loving? Stop risking? Keep an emotional barricade around our hearts so we are never hurt again?
2. Give in to judgment and bitterness. Stand above the people around us and rejoice that “we are not like them!” Act all godly on the outside, but inside, consider ourselves to be gods. Living in our little kingdoms. Attempting to ascend to the throne of God, while all the while, descending into the bowels of Hell itself.
3. Or forgive.

Those are all the choices I see. That’s the realm of our response. And in view of God’s mercy (Romans 12:1)? It seems to me that actually, our only choice is choice #3. This death to self, remembering of God, right view of others and this blink-of-an-eye we call “life”: forgiveness.

Is it easy? Absolutely not. Pleasant? No way. Necessary? Undoubtedly, 100%, with all my heart YES. We cannot claim to love God and hate our brother (1 John 4:20). It is dishonoring to God and destroys our testimony to stand back and say, “OK. Sure. I don’t have a problem with her … I mean, if she has a problem with me, then she can come and talk to me. But from my perspective? We’re good. I’ve done everything I need to do. Yeah. Right. It’s all good.” While everyone who knows the real us knows that we are not truly, deeply, actually reconciled in the “unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4).

And so, we forgive. To quote Andree Seu: “Forgiving is the hardest thing you will ever do.” To paraphrase an article I ready by her 10+ years ago: if we think it’s easy to forgive; if we can piously claim to have forgiven while knowing our hearts are cold and distant and judgmental to the person (or persons) who hurt us? Then there is no way that we have ever forgiven anyone anything.

Today, I pray that we will forgive one another. And if we are stuck and can’t forgive? If we are caught in bitterness? If our anger towards others has turned inward in depression and we’ve gone past the point of caring anymore? That especially then, we will get help.

Know that you are not alone in the battle! The Lord is with you. And if you’re struggling with some big ol’ sin, then I can probably relate too (as can many people in your real, non-virtual, non-filtered, life).

With love from the trenches,
Tara B.

PS
Two of the books that have helped me the most related to this topic:

• Nancy Leigh Demoss, Choosing Forgiveness: Your Journey to Freedom
• Ed Welch, Depression

PPS
I have a number of articles about how I actually began to move towards my mother with grace and forgiveness (after the 9/10 ACES Score-abuses of my childhood) here.