Forgive and Forget

     There comes a point in your life when you have to make yourself forgive past mistakes. Everyone does it, everyone messes up. There's many times when we say something we don't mean, do something we regret later, or even don't do something that we wish we would have. Jesus, tells us to forgive the past, because if we dwell on it especially, we will kill ourselves with hatred. He forgives us for things that we do everyday. I know as humans, it is very hard to forgive and there does come a  point where enough can be enough. God does not want us getting run over like freight trains either. But I think about this, God gets run over all the time. He loves us so much that He gives us the free-will to do as we please. He doesn't tie us down, back us into a corner, or demand that we follow Him. That's our choice.

     So why can't we be the same? Yes, we do get hurt, we disagree, we sometimes get taken advantage of, so does God. If we are supposed to be in Christ's image that means that we need to act as Christ is in us. I do admit more often than not, I don't act like a Christian. I have my faults, we all do. Forgiveness, is one of those, in most people.

     I learned a long time ago to forgive. More often than not I forgive way to easily.

     As an early teenager, I had a very hard time growing up. With losing my virginity at a young age, and having inappropriate things done to me by a family member, life was not easy.
   
      It took me many years to forgive these things and move on from those experiences. They affected the way that I interacted with my friends and family. They affected every aspect of my life, until I learned how to forgive the one's who caused the trouble.
     I read my Bible, looked up passages about forgiveness and what God says about it. Then I found the story of the cross. We all know the story, heard it a million times, but when you actually need to forgive someone to that magnitude, it shows a whole different story. After what was done to Jesus, He still hung there on the cross asking His Father to forgive those who had persecuted Him. Now, if He can forgive something like that, then it should be simple to forgive the minuscule things that happen to us. Yeah, right!
We have to learn to forgive, it doesn't come naturally by any means.

     Forgetting is a whole other story in itself. We can never 100% forget about the things that happened in the past, but we CAN move on from them. I don't think God intended us to ever truly forget the past so that we may learn from our mistakes, and correct them for future reference. We may not ever forget, but we can learn and not repeat those same mistakes.