The power of forgivenessIt takes effort to ask for forgiveness, just as it does …
It takes effort to ask for forgiveness, just as it does to forgive someone. And yet an honest effort at reconciliation is the recipe for happiness in any relationship! The Christian faith has forgiveness in its very DNA.
Love lives on forgiveness.
The fact is that: In every relationship, sooner or later you hurt the other person – and you get hurt. If there was no forgiveness, a dark cloud of past memories would always hover over love and ultimately destroy it. Forgiving yourself from the bottom of your heart and forgiving the other person completely is the royal road to lasting love. But living a reconciled life is not always easy! Strictly speaking, the willingness to forgive exceeds a person’s natural capacity for love.
Being able to forgive wholeheartedly means striving again and again for selfless love. Love that is unconditional. Love that does not stop loving even when it hurts. Love that gives itself: ”No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13)
This devotion does not always have to mean physical life. Valuing others more than oneself, giving up something out of love for others, letting go of something – that too can mean “laying down one’s life”. Devoted love does not come by itself. You have to strive for it, you have to practice it.