What does it mean to forgive someone?
That is the question that I'm facing with myself this week. In mass on sunday, the priest talked about a woman who was in a WW2 camp, and survived. Years later she was talking at her church about what had happened to her, and she saw one of the guards that ran the camp in the congregation. After the service he came up to her and apologized and begged for her forgiveness, and at first she didn't want to, but as she took his hand, she felt a wave of forgiveness come over her. Jesus teaches that we should forgive all who trespass us, and that we should be kind to our enemies and stuff like that. It's something that I've never really thought about before up until now and I'm really trying to focus on that in my life right now. I have lots of people who I have previously said that I would NEVER forgive. But now, I am really thinking that I should try really hard to do so. If that lady, who was in the concentration camp, can forgive someone who possibly tortured her, and someone who stood for something so evil, then I can forgive the people who did wrong be me. My issues and "enemies" are FAR less notorious than that, and I think that in order for me to move on as a person, and as a christian, I need to forgive those people. I WANT to forgive them. Mainly because I want people to forgive me for the things that I have done to them. Everybody deserves the chance to be forgiven. I have tried to burn a lot of my bridges and now I'm trying to build them again.
