The lie of unforgiveness is that people think it works. It does not. It’s only allowing the person who hurt you to keep hurting you. It’s allowing the knife of the wound to stay in, fester, and get infected. Removing the knife doesn’t mean that what happened to you isn’t wrong. Of course what happened is wrong, and God knows it. But forgiveness is to set you free from the wound.

The step forward is to be able to breathe again, smile again, laugh again, serve again, be joyful again. With that picture in mind, those who are traumatized can see past their pain into a better future for their world. A pregnant teen, a husband whose wife left him, a young kid about to serve thirty years in prison, a guy who almost overdosed, a mother who just lost her child — all of them need a new chapter, not a visual of the old one. Flip the page.

— from this post