Forgive and Forget

What was the Christmas about for you? For me, this Christmas was all about forgiveness! After all the merriment and eating that came with Christmas, I lay in bed thinking before I called it a night. I took the time out to reassess the outgoing year; I took a few days to assess all that had happened in the past year. It is the 29^th of December now and so I have just two days to leave 2012 in 2012.

It has been an eventful year for me, a lot happened in this one year. I had ended a relationship, learned of life changing facts, I had learned that people could not be trusted, I learned that even the people you call friend would collude with their family to hurt you, even when they knew their family were clearly in the wrong and would kill you if you did same to them. But through it all, most importantly, I have learned to forgive and forget.

My mantra has always been, the best revenge for someone that hurt you is forgiveness. The way I saw it when you forgive you free yourself of a burden and spend the energy you would have used to plot a revenge to enjoy life, lets face it, I don’t even have the strength or even the brains required to plot a suitable revenge anyway. They person who has hurt you in turn, is burdened with wondering if you have really forgiven them. That to me is even the perfect revenge, you did no work, the person that hurt you does all the ‘revenging’ for you.

But this year I learnt a very important lesson about forgives. Forgetting!!! The terms forgive and forget are terms that go hand in hand. They are terms that we heard all our lives; at least I had, but never real had to live by. As we all know the forgiving part is the easy bit, it’s in the forgetting bit that we have our biggest challenge.

I had never really been in situations where forgiving or forgetting were a problem, because I had never been seriously hurt, I lived a sheltered life, so there was really no room for that. But this year I have been faced with so many betrayals and I have found my power to forget tested. When I was first faced the challenged with forgetting, I turned to the sermon of a priest that visited my church last year, I cant even remember what he looked like but his words have seen me through a lot this year. His sermon was on forgiving and forgetting, but what stood out to me that day was what he said about forgetting. He said, forgetting didn’t mean that you had forgotten what had been done to you; it meant that when you look back at it you didn’t feel the pain you felt when it happened. These words helped me a lot this year and they made a lot of sense, I had always felt guilty that I was unable to forget what had been done to me.

I have forgiven and forgotten all that was done to me this year, but I have taken from them a lesson. I am a happier person because of the fact that I can look back at what has happened this year, without feeling what I felt at the time it happened. I am a happier person because I can look back and come up with lessons that I have learned without feeling any pain. I am a happier person because I have accepted that my past is a very important part of who I am.

I am a happier person because I have been able to FORGIVE AND FORGET.