Forgiveness After a Crisis – Why is It Often Harder As Time Passes?

I’ve recently been poring through a book called Making Sense of Forgiveness: Moving from Hurt Toward Hope by biblical counselor Brad Hambrick. It has been an enjoyable read not only because the content has been solid, but also because it reaches down into some nitty-gritty nuances of forgiveness that are rarely addressed. It’s the kind of book that makes you think, “I thought I’d heard everything there was to know about the topic of forgiveness…until now.”

I want to start with a question he raises — and then helpfully answers. The question is: why is forgiveness so often harder (for the person granting forgiveness) as time goes on? Before suggesting answers to the question, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge the reality that prompts the question in the first place. Far from getting easier over time, forgiveness — especially when it comes after a major offense or a crisis event — can actually feel more challenging and more mixed in its emotional makeup than it did initially. This goes counter to the notion we Christians often possess. It’s easy to think that forgiveness is the final, triumphant, heart-warming chapter to a difficult saga. Someone hurts you, you feel pain, you choose to forgive, and then you ride off into the metaphorical sunset. As Hambrick says, “If our life were a movie, the words ‘I forgive you’ would be the climax; the postclimactic part of the script would be relatively short. Oh, if only life were a movie!” Here are some reasons this type of forgiveness is not so easy as we often make it out to be.

• After we say “I forgive you” in crisis moments, the hard emotions have time to settle in — anger, confusion, sadness — and replay in our minds. (By “crisis” moments, we mean any offense that we are on the receiving end of that felt like it was more than we could handle at the time it occurred).
• Sometimes the hurt was so great leading up to our extending forgiveness — the revelation of the offense, learning how terrible and extensive the offense was, uneasy pre-forgiveness talks with the offender as we convey the hurt we feel — that once we actually decide to forgive and state, “I forgive you,” we are emotionally drained.
• Because we are so emotionally drained, we understandably hope that our decisional forgiveness will lead to felt relief. When that hoped-for relief does not automatically come, we begin to wonder if we’re doing something wrong.
• Postcrisis forgiveness “is mundane. It must cover a multitude of (comparably smaller) sins, not just one big sin.” In other words, the biggie sin garnered so much attention that we didn’t have time to consider other ways this person wronged us (historically over the course of time, or in smaller ways that eventually led up to the big sin).
• It can feel like the tables are turned. As Hambrick says, “During postcrisis forgiveness, when we offend (even in lesser ways) the person we forgave, we are now the ones to repent. Everyday irritants call for patience and grace, but we feel like we have been gracious and patient enough.”
• Because we are Christians whose entire basis for existence rests on the forgiveness God extended to us through Jesus, we are disappointed when the forgiveness we extend doesn’t automatically lead to reconciliation with the person who hurt us. Things still feel awkward. There’s hesitation. I don’t know that I can trust them again. “[W]hen the offense being forgiven profoundly disrupted life, there is a middle stage [to the restoration process]. If we forget this, we may wrongly assume that we have failed to forgive when we meet these new challenges. Rather, it means that we have moved to a new stage of restoration—from canceling the debt to restoring trust.”

All of this doesn’t mean the command to forgive is any less expected by God. But it does mean that forgiveness is not always simply a one-time decision or that our feelings magically align with harmony because we choose to release a person from their debt. We are not robots.

I’ll close this post with one more quote from the book, designed to give you patient hope if you can relate to this topic. “In many ways, this chapter has been like talking to a preteen about puberty. You don’t tell a preteen about the changes of puberty and then say, ‘Do it.’ Education about puberty is not about implementation. You have the conversation, so the young person is not unsettled by the changes and is comfortable talking to you about them.”