Ask Others to Forgive You

My series, Removing the Roadblocks to Forgiveness, offers survivors of abuse and trauma an opportunity to find healing through forgiving others. For the past week, we have been discovering that the best way to learn how to forgive is to look at our own faults and our need for forgiveness. So, today we consider asking someone to forgive us.

How hard can it be to say I'm sorry?
If we have been victims of long-term abuse, it can be almost impossible to admit to another human being that we have made a mistake. In an abusive relationship, such admissions open us up to further abuse.

So, we learn self-preservation by never admitting our wrongs. And we certainly never, ever tell our abuser that we're sorry...unless he's twisting our arm and threatening worse if we don't say those words that we really don't mean.

And after our abusers extract an apology from us, they feel empowered once again. Within days, hours, or minutes, they are back at us with more of the same torture we endured earlier. It's no wonder that we swallow hard and think twice before offering anyone an apology.

We need to learn that it's okay to apologize to some people.
The next step on the road to forgiving others is to ask someone to forgive us. I believe this is the hardest step of all, because it's the riskiest for survivors of abuse.

Let's begin with one important point: the first person to forgive face-to-face should not be the enemy who abused or traumatized us. Like any new learning, that kind of forgiveness begins with baby steps.

So we need to think about someone we have wronged, and we need to consider how we are going to apologize and ask for forgiveness. By beginning with someone safe, we can experience what it feels like to admit our mistake, apologize, and ask for forgiveness. From a normal person, we can expect understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness.

My forgiveness journey began with Joe.
When I married Joe, I don't think I had ever sincerely apologized to anyone in my life. Abuse had ground out any thought of admitting my faults to anyone. So you can imagine my surprise when Joe made mistakes, came to me to admit them, and asked me to forgive him. In the beginning, it was extremely difficult for me to extend forgiveness to him, in spite of the fact that he was apologizing without any pressure from me.

What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I just say I forgave Joe? I realized that in an abusive relationship, the minute an abuser offers us an apology, the cycle of abuse begins again. Like Pavlov's dogs, I had been trained to expect abuse if I ever traveled down the road of forgiveness. I couldn't offer it to anyone, and I couldn't ask for it.

Learn to see forgiveness through your enemy's eyes.
We can see by my experience why it may be so difficult for our enemies to ask us for our forgiveness. Perhaps they were abused as children and learned that admitting mistakes brought on more abuse. Maybe no one ever modeled forgiveness for them.

Model forgiveness for your enemy.
Instead of waiting for our enemies to apologize to us, we can make the best move by extending apologies to others. If our perpetrator is within view of us, he may begin to witness forgiveness at work in our lives when we:

1) admit our mistakes to others;
2) apologize;
3) ask for forgiveness; and
4) accept the grace of someone else's forgiveness.

Don't confuse forgiveness with reconciliation.
In most instances, this four-step process will lead to something that everyone confuses with forgiveness: reconciliation. That means we patch up our differences with someone, and we renew the relationship that was upset by whatever we did wrong.

Reconciliation is the number one reason, in my opinion, that survivors of abuse and trauma cannot forgive. They wrongly believe that forgiving means reconciling. If you don't get anything else out of this series, please read the next sentence carefully. Forgiving does not always entail reconciling. We'll learn more about reconciliation on Friday.

Asking for forgiveness helps us to grow.
Over the years, I have learned that forgiving Joe does not result in his abusing me. In fact, it draws us closer together. Because through our mistakes and apologies, we have learned how to conduct ourselves better as marriage partners. Forgiveness has helped us to grow.

Watching how Joe offered forgiveness taught me how to do it, too. It was not easy to learn that I could admit my mistakes, but Joe was patient with me and readily offered grace when I needed it. Without the baby steps of practicing forgiveness with Joe, I could never have reached the point where I am today with others who have hurt me more seriously.

So, if we recognize that we have broken our relationship with God by sinning, we can learn to admit our mistakes to God and to others. When we are living in safe relationships, we may learn new ways to apologize and ask others to forgive us. Tomorrow, we'll learn the importance of offering restitution to those whom we have hurt.

Today's Challenge
Are you a survivor like me who is terrified of extending forgiveness when someone apologizes to you? Are you fearful that admitting your faults and asking for forgiveness will bring about more abuse? If you're in an abusive situation, get to a safe place. Then, start practicing the habits of extending forgiveness and asking for it with people who are capable of doing the same.

Accept God's Grace Today

This marks our final week in this series, Removing the Roadblocks to Forgiveness. Last time, we learned about the importance of asking God to forgive us through daily prayer. Today, we focus on the next step along our journey toward forgiving others: accepting God's grace.

Remember grace?
In a previous post, we learned that God's grace is his goodness toward us, even when we deserve punishment. We cannot earn grace, because it is a gift freely given by God to all sinners who believe in Jesus.

Saving grace comes to us when we express our faith in Christ. Sanctifying grace falls on us daily as we pray for forgiveness of our wrongs. When we learn to accept God's grace on a daily basis, we grow by leaps and bounds in our spiritual life.

God gives grace, but we have to accept it.
Imagine a giant merchandise catalog or internet site full of free gifts. In order to receive whatever you wanted, all you had to do was provide your address. Within days, a package would arrive on your doorstep. No costs, no strings attached, just a free gift for the taking. This is how grace works. God is waiting to give it to anyone, just for asking.

If you did have an opportunity to place an order from such a catalog, would you tell the delivery person on your doorstep to take it away? Would you leave the package on your front porch, unopened? Of course, not! You would accept the package and then rip into it to see what kind of wonderful gift awaited you.

Unfortunately, many survivors of abuse and trauma turn down God's gift of grace. Why? There are one of three explanations that I can see. One, they really haven't come to a point of completely admitting their own faults, so they don't see a need for God's grace. Two, they feel so guilty and ashamed, they can't bring themselves to open the door and accept God's gift. Or three, they've been so hurt, their anger toward God prevents them from taking what he has to offer.

I turned down God's gift.
As I was contemplating divorcing my abusive first husband, a minister at my church told me that if I didn't stay and put up with my husband abusing my children and me, we would all go to hell. He quoted Matthew 18:21-22 (NIV) to me:

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?" Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times."

This Scripture passage is an important one in the process of forgiving. Unfortunately, this minister confused reconciliation with forgiveness. Living in an abusive situation is never a wise idea. We can forgive people who have abused us, but we should not put ourselves in harm's way in the process. It is better to remove ourselves from the situation so that we can work through forgiving our abusers from a distance. In my own experience, total and lasting forgiveness is difficult to achieve when we live with someone who constantly abuses us.

That minister made me feel so guilty, I could barely function. Like me, many victims of abuse get guilt heaped on them by outsiders as they consider leaving an unsafe situation.

I finally realized that I could not believe in a God who expected me to put up with abuse. In order to break free from my first husband, I had to release myself from the bonds with the angry God who only wanted to see me punished. I stopped going to church, praying, or reading the Bible.

Inevitably, depression set in. Without God, the world becomes a very dark place. As a former Stephen Minister, I knew that I needed support. So, I called a church where I was not a member and requested assistance.

For many months, a Stephen Minister came to my house to listen to me talking about the abuse, the divorce, my inability to connect with God, and all of the other issues that go along with surviving abuse. She was incredibly patient with me and let me talk until there were no more words remaining.

I recall telling her that I felt as if I had jumped off a cliff, and I was about to splat at the bottom of a rocky ravine. She smiled at me and said, "That's one way of looking at it. How about thinking that if you've jumped off a cliff, God has given you wings to fly?"

She rarely said much during our meetings, but that simple statement really got me thinking. I began to see that without God, my life seemed completely hopeless. She opened my eyes to the truth that by accepting God's grace, my life could be incredibly exciting and full of promise.

That night, I asked God to forgive me for the months I had spent burning with anger toward him. I talked to him freely about everything surrounding the divorce, asking him to forgive me for whatever part I had played in causing my marriage to fail. For the first time ever, I waited after praying for God's response. An icredible sense of peace washed over me as I felt God's goodness flowing to me.

God has a gift for you.
God had been waiting all along with his gift of grace. I just needed to accept it to complete my own forgiveness. He's got the same gift waiting for every person who expresses regret over avoiding him. Whether our rejection of God's love and his gift of grace stems from pride, guilt, shame, or anger; it's never too late to say that we're ready to accept it. For both survivors of abuse and trauma, such as the tsunami in Japan, there is hope, because God's goodness is available to all of us.

We're one step closer.
We are almost at the end of our journey, Removing the Roadblocks to Forgiveness. When we admit our own mistakes, ask God to forgive us, and accept his grace; we are one step closer to forgiving that person who deeply hurt us. Tomorrow, we'll learn about where the road takes us after we finally accept God's grace for ourselves.

Today's Challenge
Have you expressed your faith in Jesus Christ yet? If so, have you been asking God daily to forgive you? Have you felt the peace that comes with accepting his free gift of grace? Write in your journal how that feels. If you haven't arrived at this point yet, write down why you are rejecting God. Ask him to help you remove that roadblock.