10 guidelines for forgiveness

I'm not normally one for '7 steps to ...' or similar programmatic approaches to things. However, this is not so much a programme as a set of hints and I'm pretty impressed. I like what it included in this page especially the ideas of educating yourself, spending time each day 'clearing out' your thinking and weeding out the 'shoulds'.

In particular: this set of definitions of what forgiveness is not -most of them we've already seen over the last couple of months on this blog:

"Forgetting. If the hurt wounded you enough to require forgiveness, you may always have a memory of it.
Excusing or condoning. The wrong should not be denied, minimized, or justified.
Reconciling. You can forgive the offender and still choose not to reestablish the relationship.
Weakness. You do not become a doormat or oblivious to cruelty"

The one that hasn't been picked up before, at least in this kind of way is the last of them about weakness -not becoming a doormat to cruelty. It is part of the whole issue about forgiveness needing not to condone wrongdoing and applies it to oneself. I know some people shy away from forgiveness because they -rightly- shyy away from allowing evil/wrongdoing to continue and for that continuance to be given permission by their forgiveness.

Also the idea of spending time each day identifying and releasing wrongs seems eminently sensible -it would be part of everyone's life who prayed the Lord's prayer daily and thoughtfully: "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us".

I haven't seen anywhwere else on the subject of forgiving the idea of challenging the shoulds in our thinking. This is important as it gets to the roots of why we get cross with others and move on to resentment and/or grudge-bearing: we have views about how we and others should act/think. When others violate those unspoken standards our sense of righ/wrong is violated. SOmetimes [as we have discussed already] those standards are fair enough; sometimes, however, they are inappropriate and we need to recognise that fact and 'debug' our thinking. In that way we can remove, over time, some of the occasions that can generate lack of forgiveness in us.

Definitely a bookmarkable page.