Fighting with Forgiveness

My devotion today was in Proverbs 1:19-33, and it was full of so many examples of the ways we stray from wisdom and instruction, the ways we fight authority.  It shows us that God gets angry with us when we blatantly ignore Him. 

I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here.

I think a lot of times, we have a skewed view of what it means for God to forgive us when we wrong Him.  Yes, His love is unconditional, and yes, He will always forgive us, but I think we rarely stop to actually think how much it hurts Him when we don't listen. 

He gets angry, and rightfully so.  He gets jealous of all the things we fill our lives with that aren't in Him.  and He has promised to forgive us, but that doesn't mean it is always easy for Him to do so. 

I met with my d-group for chi alpha tonight and at one point during the night we talked about the meaning of forgiveness.  Let me just tell you that it is not easy for me to forgive people sometimes.  I tend to be very discerning when it comes to letting go of petty little unimportant things, but when someone really hurts me to the core, I know how to hold a grudge like the best of them.

One such instance is that of my relationship with a boy named Corey.  At the beginning, I thought Corey's arrival into my life had been ordained, and little did I know that it had, just not by the One I thought it had been.  You see Satan has a conniving way of making you beleive you are getting exactly what you want, with the intention of destroying you along the way. 

Corey's dad had started a church in their little home town up near Branson, and so Corey was very involved in church.  He had all the right lines memorized, and on the outside, it seemed too good to be true.  It was. 

While he was perfect out in public, he had a way of making me feel worthless.  He wanted me to be this pretty little blonde Barbie doll, and didn't know me well enough to know that that was never going to happen.  I've always been strong willed, so no one knew how bad I was hurting while I was with him, because there was no way that I was going to let anyone know I had a flaw.  As soon as I was locked away in my room though, it was an entirely different story. 

I spent countless nights crying myself to sleep.
and wondering why I wasn't good enough.

On my 18th birthday, some terrible things happened, the sort of things that leave deep scars. 
and to make a long story much shorter, it took me the better part of a year to recover my self-image and realize that I was more than just damaged goods.  That I was worth something. 

Now, I am not writing all this for the purpose of outing that boy, or tarnishing his name.  I doubt he will ever even know it was written.  The purpose of this is so that you might see that according to the human race, I have every reason to hold a grudge.  To hate this boy. 

And yet I want, with everything in me, to forgive him.  I have spent so much time and wasted so much energy holding that grudge.  I am ready to let it go; to be free from how hurt I was.  In very American terms, I am ready for some closure; not the let's sit down and have a heart-to-heart kind, (because I really feel it would be a terrible idea ever to come into contact with him again) but just knowing that I've closed the book.  I am ready to forgive. 

It may not happen tonight, or tomorrow, or even this week, but soon.  Because God tells us to forgive.  and in Proverbs 1:23 He tells us to "come and listen to my counsel.  I'll share my heart with you and make you wise." So I am done fighting the urge to forgive.  I am forgiving. 

Love always,
Lacy Brianne