A Prayer for Forgiveness
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
— Matthew 6:12
Forgiveness goes in two directions, and neither one is easy. There's the asking — Lord, I got it wrong and I know it and I need you to take this weight off me. And there's the giving — letting go of what somebody else did, not because it didn't matter, but because carrying it is breaking something in us that wasn't broken before. I've needed both kinds in my life, sometimes in the same week. The asking is humbling. The giving is harder. But I've learned this much: the unforgiven thing, whether mine or someone else's, takes up room. It sits in the chest like a stone, and it gets heavier every year until we set it down.
Lord, I need your forgiveness today.
You know what I've done. You know the parts I've tried to justify and the parts I can't. You know the ways I've hurt people I love and the times I've known better and done it anyway.
I'm not asking you to pretend it didn't happen. I'm asking you to take the weight of it, because I can't carry it anymore.
And Lord — where I need to forgive — where someone has hurt me and I'm still holding onto it like a fist I can't unclench —
help me open my hand.
Not because what they did was all right. It wasn't. But because the holding is hurting me now more than the thing itself.
Forgive me. And help me forgive.
Amen.
The hardest thing about forgiveness is that it looks like letting someone off the hook, and it isn't. It's letting ourselves off the hook — off the hook of carrying the bitterness, off the hook of replaying the conversation, off the hook of being defined by what someone else chose to do to us. Forgiveness isn't saying it was fine. It's saying I'm done letting it run my life. The Lord's Prayer puts them together for a reason: forgive us, as we forgive. The two motions are connected. The mercy we receive and the mercy we extend — they flow from the same source, and they both set us free.
For the weight you've been carrying. Ruby writes a short devotional every morning — a verse, and a few honest words for the day. You can subscribe — it's free, or stay a while and read more of her writing.
When forgiveness is the hard work, these might sit with you: