Source: Amistad Cristiana / Unsplash
Most of us don’t think of the option of forgiving life. It might be easier to see that forgiving God is something we’re more comfortable considering. I prefer to focus on life as fashioned by the Creator. Life as the tendency to give and take. It can offer opportunities for love, belonging, achieving, joy, and satisfaction. Each of these can also be taken away as we experience a loss of love or isolation, sorrow, defeat, and disillusionment. Life can play the death card without any warning.
When We Don’t Forgive Life
There are a number of consequences when we either don’t see that forgiving life is a possibility, or we simply don’t want to do it.
- Chronic anger: When life takes what is precious to us, it’s easy to remain angry. Intense anger acts as a wall distancing us from others. We may lose opportunities for love, friendship, collegiality, and collaboration.
- Cynicism: It’s easy to remain cynical due to loss. Cynicism is a loss of faith in life, usually resulting in feeling lost and unable to discern what truly matters.
- Remaining distrustful: Living with a compromised level of trust can happen when we experience loss because we were betrayed.
- Being trapped in an analysis of fairness: Once we believe we have lived an upstanding life with no intent to harm anyone, we decide that what was taken from us is unfair. We can take up residency in the accusation that life is unfair. Of course, life is not fair, and it makes sense to stop pretending that it should be.
- Risk avoidance: We can decide that we are able to control further losses by minimizing the risk we take. Such a decision actually has us living less.
Forgiving Life
Let’s look at how we can prepare to forgive life and what’s to be gained by doing so.
- Life—not my life: We pave the way toward forgiving life when we can shed a bit of narcissism. It’s only too easy to see our losses as only about our lives as opposed to life itself. Life guarantees nothing, and your next breath is a gift.
- Release from victimhood: When we forgive life, we let go of being life’s victim. It then becomes easier to be both grateful and generous.
- Living on life’s terms: As we become more forgiving of life, we become more accepting of living life on life’s terms. Such acceptance entails the realization that life’s terms are so much larger than our intentions and plans.
- Peace: Peace comes as we accept that life will give and life will take. We live with more gratitude for what is given and forgiveness for what is taken.
- Courage: In the absence of fairness and predictability, being alive calls for courage. Courage means that we can face our fears, be clear about what we are asking of life, and be curious about what life asks of us.
- A greater communal spirit: Forgiving life is typically accompanied by the recognition that offering help and getting help go a long way to generating more resiliency in the face of what life takes from us.
Forgiving life is not necessarily something that comes easily following a severe loss. We may need to grieve, which might include feeling betrayed by life. Let life know how betrayed you feel, how angry and disappointed you feel. Let your sorrow be heard by those who care for you. Being in the presence of your sorrow reminds others they are being touched by something so essentially human. It’s an invitation to their humanity. And as your sorrow story is witnessed with love and compassion, it makes its way into your narrative. You then carry a different sorrow story, one that has a profound kinship with forgiveness. It’s you getting right with yourself.
