What's the key to extending forgiveness when you've been hurt?

As we go through life, it’s easy to collect a catalog of hurts committed against us by other people. This happened to me in my twenties, as other people said and did things that hurt me. They weren’t major things, but these errant words and cutting critiques lodged into my conscience and festered there for years.

I would stew on these hurts, frustrated that the other person had wronged me, yet seemed to have gotten away with it. “These people have hurt me so much,” I’d think to myself, “Yet they have no clue how much pain they’ve caused.”

This seemed unjust to me, so I felt like I needed to punish them, to make them pay for the hurt that they’d caused me. I had no contact with them by this point, so my retribution showed up as bitterness. I harbored hatred in my heart and nursed grudges against them, hoping that this would somehow repay them for what they’d done to me.

A moment of insight

After this had gone on for a few years, though, I experienced a moment of insight that changed my perspective toward these situations. If these people had hurt me without ever knowing it, wasn’t it probable that I’d hurt them and other people, in ways that I didn’t know?

This simple realization shocked me. If they were unaware of the hurt they had caused in my life, then maybe I was unaware of the hurt that I’d caused in their life. What if things I had said or done hurt them just as badly, or even worse, than they’d hurt me?

As I thought about this, my self-righteousness, the foundation of my call for justice, melted. I had been so busy painting myself as the victim of their injustices that I’d never entertained the possibility that I might be guilty of the same behavior.

Through this, I had to come to terms with the reality that I wasn’t an innocent party in this problem of hurtfulness, but was a co-conspirator in the world’s brokenness.

This was the nudge I needed to begin to forgive them. “Yeah, they’ve hurt me,” I’d say to myself whenever the feelings of bitterness would flare up, “But I’ll assume that I hurt them, too. And so I’ll forgive them for what they’ve done, in hopes that they’ll forgive me as well.

A call for reflection

I share these things with you to encourage all of us to remember that we’re not as righteous or honorable or innocent as we imagine. We so often have an encyclopedic memory of all of the times that we’ve been hurt, stretching back to our youngest years, yet immediately forget, downplay, or fail to even realize all of the times that we’ve hurt other people.

So when you are tempted to repay someone for a time that they hurt you, remember that you’ve been the source of cruel words and hurtful actions. We can then drop our facade of self-righteousness and extend forgiveness to others, since we know how badly we need it ourselves.

No quote captures this dynamic better than a line by Miroslav Volf, who, when talking about the 1990s war between Serbia and Croatia, wrote:

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.

This captures exactly what I was doing: excluding myself from the community of sinners while excluding the people who had hurt me from the community of humans.

They were evil, in my mind, and didn’t say those things in passing but rather to hurt me intentionally. I, on the other hand, had never said anything cutting, sarcastic, or hurtful, obviously; I was just misunderstood.

So what’s my point?

If we ever want to be able to forgive others, we have to recognize that we’re all people who have, and will continue to, hurt others. We have to acknowledge that we’re each a part of the community of sinners and that our enemies are a part of the community of humans.

When we recognize our need for God’s forgiveness, then our hearts can extend forgiveness to them. This doesn’t mean that the relationship or friendship has to be restored, but that we can stop punishing them for what they’ve done to us in the past. This sets us free from the hurt and enables us to live lives of goodness, peace, and love.

The apostle Paul sums up this whole process in Colossians 3 when he writes:

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.

So the next time you are tempted to rehash a past hurt, ask yourself, “What if I have treated people even worse than they have treated me, in ways that I’m not aware of?” None of us is innocent, which means that we all need God’s forgiveness.

And when you recognize this, it’ll cut your self-righteousness down at the root, softening your heart so that you can extend forgiveness to others.