Love Brings Forgiveness

What comes into your mind every time you say “love”? Is that warmth, affection, tolerance or understanding?  Each aforementioned word does define love in a whole way. Love may bring warmth even in the most freezing winter, melting every severe hatred and blooming the pieces of forgiveness. Love is an ability to forgive. In their book “Why Good Things Happen to Good People”, Post and Neimark (2011) propose that forgiveness is the crucial expression of love. It needs enough courage, empathy and determination as the forgiveness is all about process. They also come up with a real story about the buffetings toward forgiveness.

A woman whose name doesn’t want to be announced recalls about the most devastating moment in her life. She lost her Dad when she was 20 because of car accident. She and her Dad was about one turn away from their house when the accident happened. A careless driver used the right traffic lane to overtake and ignored traffic light. He stepped on the gas to overtake a truck. The truck hit the middle barrier and tore his Dad’s car apart.  His Dad’s body was totally shattered. Then, the careless driver got out of the car then grumbled about his scratched car paint. He was sentenced only 40 hours for people service.

She was really broken. No words can describe how unfair the life is. His Dad’s  soul was considered as equal as 40-hour sentence.  Her Dad death affected her mother’s health. In 28, she lost her mother too because of cancer.

She needs a couple years to forgive the man. Until someday, she talk to herself that “I have a faith. It is apparent that he deserves forgiveness. I keep trying to pray for the man, for his better life. I do hope that he will grow.” With the remnant of love she has, she is able to forgive the worst damn thing in her life.

I believe the above story is capable of evoking our conscience to contemplate about forgiving and being forgiven. It is suggested that when we find ourselves difficult to forgive someone, let’s think how relieved when we’re being forgiven.  There are several researches that show the benefit of forgiveness. Charlotte Witvliet, a psychologist from Hope College in Michigan conducted study toward 71 students. She asked them to think about someone who have hurt them and reacted in their heart whether giving forgiveness or not.  The result shows that those who don’t give reaction for forgiveness suffer from physiological stress.  While forgiveness reaction were reported for leading students to peaceful body and mind. It is concluded, that playing the pain in the brain over and over again will get ourselves burdensome. Post and Neimark (2011) describe this condition as carrying potato pouch on the shoulder everywhere we go. We bring it to workplace, to restroom, to gym, even to bed. The potato is the symbol of hatred. We put one potato into the pouch every time we rewind the detestation. Day by day, the pouch gets weightier and our shoulder couldn’t stand carrying it. How tortured we are, aren’t we?  So, let’s learn to forgive and grow our ability to love. 

Thanks to MSSF for always understanding me.