One day it occurred to me if I am always waiting for these other people to change, then I’m saying my healing is contingent on choices that I have no say so over.
And so one day this thought just kind of bubbled up and it was probably a combination of Bible study, uh intense counseling.
Um and maybe even just sheer exhaustion of living with so much hurt for so long.
I decided today is my day.
I’m gonna stick a stake in the ground and I’m gonna say I deserve to stop suffering because of what other people have done to me.
And that was the day that I decided to start redefining forgiveness.
I’d spent over 1000 hours studying forgiveness in the Bible. And before you think, wow, that is so holy.
I did it because I was looking for a loophole.
I was thinking surely there are except exceptions to God’s command to forgiveness. And I was frustrated.
I had so many questions. And what I discovered is that forgiveness isn’t an unfair gift I have to give to the people who hurt me.
Forgiveness is actually God’s provision of healing for my heart.
The hurting heart so that the hurting heart can heal you.
Talk about forgiveness, not being an act of determination, but an act of cooperation and that empowers us.
Can you tell us more? Absolutely.
I felt for so long like, ok, if I forgive this person, isn’t that me saying that what happened was no big deal when I very much know that it was a big deal or is it me saying I’m just gonna give permission to this person to keep hurting me when I wanted the exact opposite of that I wanted for the source of the hurting to stop, so that true healing could happen.
And so one of the biggest steps that I discovered in forgiveness is that it’s both a decision and it’s a process.
The decision to forgive is me saying forgiveness doesn’t originate with me, it originates with God.
And as God’s forgiveness flows to me, then I just simply must cooperate with it so that it can flow through me to another person.
And the problem is if, if I think I only need a tiny bit of forgiveness from God to flow to me, then I’m only gonna let a tiny bit of forgiveness flow through me.
So I have to first admit my own desperate need for forgiveness.
And that’s not saying that what happened in this situation where I was desperately hurt.
It’s not saying that, you know, I created it, I caused it.
It’s certainly not saying that there’s ever a justification for abuse or anything like that.
It’s saying I need God’s forgiveness for my heart because part of what I had to confess to God is that I really was holding on to bitterness and I didn’t want to admit that.
So as I let God’s forgiveness flow to me and let it flow through me, I realized forgiveness is not based on my determination.
It’s based on my cooperation with what God has already done. That’s the decision to forgive.
But there’s also a space to walk through the process of forgiveness.
The process of forgiveness is gonna be much longer because that’s where I’m saying that I still have hurt feelings.
I make the decision to forgive. It’s a marked moment where I’m being obedient to God.
And I say I forgive this person for the offense that happened.
The process of forgiveness is where I deal with the impact that those offenses had on me.
The emotional cost, the devastation that happened.
There’s still space to walk through that process of healing that takes a much longer time than just the decision to forgive.
You know, I find it interesting in your book that you point out that triggers are a way forward into healing.
Will you unpack that for us? I know it doesn’t feel like it.
And right, even when you say it and I know I’ve written it.
Um But when I live it, I can still find myself thinking triggers are such an unfair consequence of the trauma that I’ve walked through, the trauma that you’ve walked through.
And I used to get so aggravated.
I used to think why would God allow this pain to leak into my life over a long period of time?
Because every time I’m triggered in pain, I feel so frustrated all over again.
And I can easily start to feel like, oh, forgiveness doesn’t really work for me. But that’s not what’s happening.
Once I make the decision to forgive for the fact of what happened, no one can take that away from me.
I have been obedient to God.
So you don’t have to be concerned that your forgiveness failure because that’s not it.
You forgive him for the fact.
But walking through the impact, the emotional cost that this has had on your life, of course, you’re gonna get triggered.
So I wanna say if you’re getting triggered in your pain, A that’s normal. B of course, you’re getting triggered.
But c it’s not a cruel situation that God is allowing because I feel like if the full impact were to have hit me all at once at the moment that the trauma happened, it probably would have killed me.
So I think it’s God’s gift that it leaks out over triggers over a long period of time so that I can deal with the impact and increments that I can process and survive this really hard thing that I’ve walked through.
It sounds intense, but the reality is sometimes trauma and pain can manifest so intensely physically that it does almost kill us.
And you experience that in, in this last season of trauma in your life that you were going through in your marriage.
Will you share us a little bit about that? Absolutely.
So I found out that my husband of over two decades, um, was being unfaithful and honestly, I felt like we had checked all the boxes of doing everything that we were supposed to do to protect our marriage.
And yet here we were in this situation, I never saw coming and a pain that honestly shattered me to my core.
I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
And so the only thing I knew to do was to take all that pain and just push it down inside of me and try to get through this.
And I think maybe because I love studying the Bible and I’m a Bible teacher.
I kept thinking, I’m just gonna do another Bible study and something’s gonna click and I’m gonna finally be able to deal with these feelings.
But when I came to realize this Bible study is crucial and it’s important and I do it every day and I’m thankful for it.
But I also needed to go to a good Christian counselor to help me learn how to process these feelings that were inside of me that I did not know what to do with.
And it was through that processing with the counselor that I started to realize how much trauma there was, that was deep down inside of me.
And here’s why this is so, so important, hurt left unattended, sitting inside the human heart can turn into versions of hate or turn us into someone that we hate.
Like we almost turn the hate on us ourselves or on other people.
And usually it’s not always directed at the original person that hurt us.
So no matter what that trauma needs to be dealt with, the emotions need to be processed, I always say feelings are great indicators that something needs to be dealt with but should never be dictators of how we act and react.
And when our feelings start to become dictators of how we act and react, that’s a sign of un dealt with trauma in your book.
In the process of forgiveness. You, you have them ask themselves, what do I believe about myself or the world as a result of a, of a situation I’ve gone through?
Can you give us? I just found that such a powerful tool.
Can you give us an example of, of what you’re illustrating here and, and suggesting that we do?
Yeah. So every event that we go through, especially events that are, are marked with so much intense emotion that they become crystal clear movies that we replay in our mind over and over again?
That, that’s gonna help determine some kind of perception that we carry from this event.
And that perception is gonna start to build a belief system of what we think is true about ourselves, others and God and, and maybe even the world at large.
And so it’s very hard for us to recognize Faal faulty perceptions.
Um because the intensity of what we walk through has skewed our perception, which is informing our beliefs.
And so in the book Forgiving, what you can’t forget, I help people collect the dots of their story, these major events that they’ve walked through and then connect the dots so we can ask ourselves, what is a lie that we’re believing from this collection of events that we gone through and after we connect, collect the dots and connect the dots, then we have to correct the dots so that those lines that have been spoken over us and those lies that we believe don’t turn into a liability in all our future relationships.
Hm Yeah, so profound. And you know, I did that practice of connecting the dots using your book.
I it was very, very powerful and gave me new insight into my life and, and you know, the freedom that God wants for us.
And I think it’s, you know, you’ve said that you’ve studied the topic of forgiveness in the Bible for over 1000 hours and that God offers us an exchange for when we are suffering.
And need to forgive. Can you talk to us about the beauty God wants for us? Absolutely.
Have you ever had an experience where you were gonna go buy a car?
Let’s say I’m not gonna try to pick out which car you would say.
But let’s say you were wanting to buy a red S U V.
And so you thought this is so unique. This is amazing.
Like I never ever see red S U V s.
But suddenly now that you’re thinking about red S U V s, you’re driving down the road and they, they’re everywhere.
You pull into a parking lot and there’s like 10 red S U V s or you go through a drive-through and there’s two red S U V s ahead of you.
And you thought you can easily think to yourself what happened?
Where did all these red S U V s come come from?
Well, what I’m discovering is the red S U V s were there all along.
It’s just we weren’t thinking about them, so we weren’t looking for them, therefore, we didn’t see them.
And that’s a good thing for us to recognize when we are walking through hard things in life.
Sometimes we just start developing a filter where all we look for is more hard things and the fallout of the hard things that we’ve been through.
But in the book for giving, what you can’t forget I wanted to help people retune their mind to finding the beautiful that still exist in ourselves, in other people, in God and in the world.
And the more we look for it, the more we’ll see it and the more we see it, the more we’ll believe it’s real and the more it restores us, Lisa, someone is probably watching right now and saying, OK, I want to put this into practice and, you know, you’ve got to get the book forgiving what you can’t forget.
But, but also Lisa, you have some takeaways at the end of the book.
If it feels too big, what are the small steps we can take in our today, these very moments?
What can we do? Absolutely.
Well, I give a process of how to look for verses in the Bible and what to do with them so that we understand forgiveness isn’t just for the hard and horrific things we go through.
Forgiveness is supposed to be as much a part of our daily life as eating, breathing, sleeping, exercising, and forgiving, eating, breathing, sleeping, exercising, and forgiving.
And the more we keep our heart swept clean, the more that we allow the Lord’s forgiveness to flow to us through the power of confession, the more we let it flow through us, the less we’ll hold onto offenses and the lighter our moods will be and the brighter our outlook will be.
That doesn’t mean we won’t still go through hard times.
But when we go through those hard times we won’t sink in the process, we will learn how to eventually be able to continue to see beautiful and walk through hard things without feeling the weight of them sticking to us and trying to drag them through the rest of our lives.