So far as we have walked this journey of forgiveness, we have looked at what forgiveness is not, some of the reasons why we need to forgive and then last week we looked at the steps of forgiveness, if ever so briefly, and we are going to return to that today as we move onto the idea of forgiveness in families. Now the steps to forgiveness in families are not different from those to forgiving others, but the hurts we have in our families are often bigger or deeper because we have greater expectations from those we love, or whom are supposed to love us, than we do for others in our lives. And so, when there are breaches of trust or loss, and most often that’s what happens with our family hurts, they dig deeper into our lives and the stones that we carry as a result and bigger and heavier, and so I thought it necessary to try and deal with these issues specifically. But, before we get into those hurts and how we forgive them, I wanted to switch things up a bit, because while we’ve talked about how to give forgiveness we haven’t talked about how to seek forgiveness, and while that too could probably be its own message, we’re not going to spend that much time discussing it, but it is important to at least talk about because as I said just as we carry rocks around representing the hurts that others have given us, so too others carry around the rocks of hurt that have our names on them.
Rev. Adam Hamilton says that there are six words everyone needs to know to be able to keep a relationship together. The first three are hard, and that is, as we’ve been working on, “I forgive you.” But the other three may be even harder, and so we’re going to practice saying them, and that is “Please forgive me.” Can we say that together? Now while I think that’s a good start, I do disagree with him and think that there’s six other words that have to go along with this. The first of those three is “I was wrong.” Can we say that together? And the final three are “I am sorry.” Now how about we say all three of them? I wanted to practice here because it’s easier to practice it when there’s nothing on the line then saying it without practice when it really matters. And it doesn’t matter which order you say them in, but they are the start. Just as one of the steps of giving forgiveness is to name exactly what it is that happened and why it hurt, and the same is true in seeking forgiveness. If we are truly seeking forgiveness, then we have to be able to say what we did and why it was wrong. If we cannot admit that, then we’re not actually seeking forgives, we’re just seeking to be absolved of our guilt, and those are not the same thing. This is also the not the time in which you seek to explain yourself, or make excuses. The one exception to that is if it’s to use that to say what you learned from it so you can try and not have it happen again.
