Forgiveness : Is It Necessary?

As I turned 27 years old this year, I like to have a flashback in my mind about things happened in my life through the year. I'm not gonna say 2019 is a great year (maybe one of the worst) but in the middle of chaos I met a lot of good people who helped me grow into a better version of me and most important they helped me and made me closer with God (which I never thought I can made this far).

One thing I learn (and still learning) in very hard way is : forgiveness.

C.S. Lewis wrote "Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive."

I always thought that I'm the type who easy to forgive, turns out I was naive. Forgiveness is not easy nor simple if you do it wholeheartedly. I talk about total forgiveness not just like "Yeah I forgive you but I don't want to deal anymore with you." or "I forgive you but I don't want to help you again." But this morning, I read story about a king who forgave a servant with an enormous debt, only to find that the forgiven servant refused to have mercy on a fellow servant who owed him a small debt by comparison (Matthew 18 : 23-34). See? Sometimes forgiving can be extremely hard.

While I read the passage, I realize my reaction is like the servant who not give mercy to others while I'm begging (and nagging) to God to forgive and have mercy on me.

One thing my mentor said to me : "We do not earn our forgiveness, but Jesus achieved that for me and you on the cross."

As Jesus want to forgive me a sinner, why I can't (or maybe I don't want to) forgive and have mercy with others? All of us have been forgiven so much by God that we must keep on forgiving others (continually) remembering how small the offense or mistakes committed to us compared our sin to God. Forgiveness doesn't mean approving of what the others did, nor excusing, nor denying, nor pretending that I am not hurt. Rather, I am aware of what other has done to me and yet I still forgive. I repeat, this is not easy nor simple, but it's do-able. Show mercy and grace to the person who has hurt you. Easy to said yet hard to do.

As I mention above I'm thankful that God put right people around me, including the one who hurt me is still the right person to teach me one or two lesson. So I "thank you" to everyone who appear in my life, either you stay or not, I still "thank you".