When You Have to Forgive Between 1 and 1,000 Times

The difficult thing about forgiveness is how many times you have to do it.

You know the drill: you write a letter you’ll never send, trek to a place that used to mean something but now just stirs up hurt, and try to reclaim it as a spot you’re still allowed to love. You even hold a makeshift burning ceremony, tossing whatever’s left of what once mattered into the flickering flame of a windblown match—hoping, of course, that this will somehow make it all magically disappear and let you move on.

You call up your friends, your sister, your therapist, and maybe even your pastor—basically anyone who’ll listen—as you try to untangle the emotional mess someone left behind in your soul. Eventually, you convince yourself that you’ve talked it to death, done all the emotional gymnastics to understand, grieve, and accept. You think you’ve untangled the knot, and now—at last—you’re free! The sadness, pain, and the emotional bleed that’s been trickling down the back of your heart for weeks (or was it months? Years?) is all but gone. You’ve forgiven! Or at least, you really, really hope so.

Then one morning, it happens. You’re just going about your business when a song starts playing, and out of nowhere, your brain decides to remount a lavish production bringing the entire drama back from the dead. Or maybe you read a poetic passage that seems like it was written specifically to stir up the pain you thought you’d dealt with. But the most delightful moment? You’re just trying to get ready for the day, doing your makeup, and suddenly you feel that old, uninvited heat creeping up your neck—something the blush can’t hide. It colors your thoughts with a fiery red, and before you know it, you’re back in that moment, imagining all the things you should’ve said, how you could’ve responded, and how maybe—just maybe—you should’ve thrown something through their window. But you didn’t, because you’d already committed to forgiving them. Now you’re left with the regret of not throwing things within a timeframe that would have been appropriate in relation to when that person was a jerk. Missed opportunities, am I right?

So, you missed the chance to throw things. You’ve ridden the high of the moral high ground to its natural end. Now, you’re faced, once more, with a choice: can I forgive them again? Or is this the end of the line for me when it comes to freedom from the jail cell they constructed for me?

Here’s what I think – we often view forgiveness wrongly. We think it’s a choice we make when, really, it’s an attitude of the heart. We think it’s an extending of the hand to a fellow human being, or even a hand over our own hearts, but really it’s a lifting of the hand to God. A lifting of the hand and a bowing of the knee.

Sometimes forgiveness is sitting on a rock at the edge of a trail and remembering that I do not have the power to dissolve my own pain the moment I want it gone. Instead, it’s a prayer, “Lord, here I am again with these memories. Here I am again with a chasm in the center of my softest internal space feeling so angry I can barely hear the birds singing in the trees above my head. I can’t forgive today and I hope you will forgive me for that.“

I know that rock well. But I also know God well enough to understand that when I bring my chasm to Him, He breathes water into it. Hear me out: imagine an empty gorge and then imagine it filling with crystal clear water. The depths still exist but God’s mercy grants me the space to swim. To be bouyant even in the midst of the depths below me. He allows me to sit with my pain while also knowing I won’t drown.

Forgiveness is swimming with the memories in your mind while trusting in God’s all-encompassing buoyancy to get you to the other side of the divide. It’s choosing to stop treading water and, instead, turning over on your back to float. To look up at the sky, feel the coolness of the trickles as they ripple below your body, and to whisper, “Well, this hurts but it’s also really beautiful here. God, I trust you.”

Nothing is ever just one thing.

Forgiveness can feel scary, daunting, and nearly impossible. It can also be empowering, joyful, and freeing.

One thing it isn’t is easy.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a lot about Holocaust survivor and Mengele Twin, Eva Mozes Kor. Walking with and learning from her gave me a treasure trove of questions and ideas on all kinds of topics. First and foremost, forgiveness. What you’ll see in my writing is that I deeply respected her, loved her, and was ever-amused by her resilient and feisty spirit! You’ll also see that we didn’t always agree on what forgiveness is or how to achieve it, but we always listened, laughed, and learned with one another.

❤️, Jill Szoo Wilson

(Originally posted February 22, 2025)