One thing I want to be careful of is not to minimize the significant hurt or pain that some people have experienced as they work on forgiving others. In other words, there is a great deal of difference in forgiving someone for talking about us behind our back and shooting our dog; there is a great deal of difference between forgiving someone for saying something to us in anger and physically assaulting us. The greater the offense we suffer, the greater the forgiveness that is required of us. The greater the offense, the longer the time that we may need to process our pain, to allow God to heal us and to come to the place where we can extend forgiveness. The key with Joseph, Corrie Ten Boom and Jesus and their ability to forgive so much, so completely, is that each of them kept their hearts in tune with God. It was a daily, if not an hourly, process. So we may, indeed, need some significant time to process a major wound, possibly even years, before we are able to extend forgiveness. We just need to make sure that, through God's grace and strength, we get to the point where we actually do forgive - that we set both ourselves and our offender free!
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