"Forgive or Not To Forgive That Is The Question"

I have been talking about communication these last few weeks because I believe the relationship starts and ends there. Your success or failure in any relationship will be measured by your communication. Unforgiveness can be one of the biggest hinderances and barriers to open and honest communication. It can be a poison that leads to anger, bitterness, and resentment. Ask yourself this question when an issue or problem arises and turns to a heated debate, do you dive head first into your backlog of past hurts and mistakes committed against you or just bad choices in general. If you do chances are high you have a reserve tank of unforgiveness that boils over when heated. In other words when we have an issue arise that is troublesome or painful we tend to lump it together with the past hurts or just stack it on top of our old junk. This junk just makes for a bigger mess to clean up and confuses the situation. I'm sure you heard the old saying one step forward two steps back. This is a simple explanation of what unforgiveness does to us in life. Essentially where unforgiveness exists we are always in a deteriorating state. The anger, bitterness, and resentment that we have bottled up inside keeps us looking at the past, hence we never move forward and progress to our future. It's a form of bondage and we can stay there forever if we choose. You see it's our choice. It is just like being a prisoner with a life sentence with no hope for parole. Nothing has to happen externally for us to forgive. We don't need to have someone change or apologize because in most cases that won't happen but we can set ourselves free from the pain and hurts that have left scars on our hearts and minds.

God tells us that we must forgive to be forgiven. The key here is to realize that we all make mistakes and if we get real honest and examine our hearts we will see that we have needed others to forgive us on occassion too. The closer you are to people the more opportunity there is to disapoint or make mistakes. In marriage you are closer to no one more than your spouse which in turn means you will need to forgive each other more often. This sounds like a bad deal but it's actually the opposite. It is a core relationship building block which is one of the reasons God requires it of us. We can't survive without forgiveness. We will all fail, none of us is without sin. So get out of that jail cell and forgive someone today.