Hey Friend!
How are you? I’m glad the holidays are done and we’re getting back to the “normal” schedule. I love the holidays and time spent with family, but also like the routine of our regular life too.
This time of year gives me time to reflect on the interactions with family members over the holidays. Were they good? Bad? Could there be improvement?
While the holidays give us the opportunity to spend quality time with our families, sometimes old grievances pop up and ruin otherwise good times.
If this happened to you over the holidays, you get the opportunity to practice persistent forgiveness. It’s a tool I use with people I see on a periodic basis and who drive me crazy.
It’s based on a question Peter asked Jesus “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:21-22).
By my math, that’s 490 times, but I somehow don’t think Jesus meant for us to keep track and say that we didn’t have to forgive on the 491st time. I think the point is to persistently forgive.
If you’re holding a grudge against one of your relatives for something that happened over the holidays, let’s start this year right and practice persistent forgiveness. This means to persistently entrust God with our hurt, pain and anger.
Imagine you’re carrying the hurt, pain and anger as a backpack full of rocks. Feel the weight. Take one rock out, examine it, place the rock on God’s altar. Do this for each rock.
Don’t take rocks back! I’m a master at doing that and it doesn’t do me any good. Instead, persist in placing rocks on God’s altar, even when you take a few back. The result of persistent forgiveness is an empty backpack!
Halleluiah!
Persistently yours,
Michelle
Ps. If you want to know more about how to forgive, I’m putting together an online course containing 10 forgiveness tools to help you forgive. Sign up here if you’d like to be a part of this course to make your 2020 a forgiving year.