Understanding Unforgiveness and Forgiveness

UNDERSTANDING UN-FORGIVENESS AND FORGIVENESS
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Worthington writings forgiveness often triggers to the mind to mind to consider automatically how a Christian would react to a situation that demands forgiveness. If one forgives another yesterday for an offense, then it is imperative to ponder on how the forgiver would handle the negative emotions that bubble to the surface today. Well, it could mean that the individual never forgave the other; also, one might wonder how long forgiveness takes. It is these concerns that ideally provided directions to the differentiation of forgiveness two categories that have given the writer his impressive recognition. The latter is rather mechanical, where a person makes a judicial decision to close the case regarding an offense committed. Under this scenario, a person makes a willful decision to no longer pursue revenge or seek anything from the offender, this is supported in (Matthew 6:12-15). Emotional forgiveness is the process rather than an abrupt decision, where harmful unforgiving feelings are replaced with constructive inclined feelings such as sympathy, love or kindness. Even though it might take love,
Worthington calls a total elimination of all harmful intolerant emotions.
When one is still burdened by painful memories of an offense inflicted by another person, the REACH process can serve as a useful tool to move to either a decisional forgiveness or emotional forgiveness. Personally, emotional forgiveness seems the better options as it totally alleviates one from the burden of the memories.

REACH is an acronym for recall, empathize, altruism and committing, a tool that has been subjected to scientific tests with positive results in over a dozen scientifically controlled studies. Hence, the tool can make an individual become more forgiving, if one was to rely on the results of the studies.
When one recalls the hurt, it helps in accepting that a wrong was committed on one, and most of the time, when trying to protect oneself, a person attempts to push the hurt to the subconscious. This part is often epitomized by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s statement after the end of the Apartheid in South African in which he demanded forgiveness to be given a deeper thought. The natural reaction of an individual to hurt is to avoid the offer, which can be mentally strenuous and frustrating. Empathy as the second step is very difficult, often it becomes a big barrier. However, it involves seeing things from the perspectives of the offender and identifying the pressures that might have influenced their actions. In the personal case, the empathy with the offender is important that one does not focus on the offense on its own, but look at the bigger picture, a somewhat generalizations of the events happening in a psychological manner. Perhaps the offender acted in total ignorance of my situation, and possibly out of his own selfish needs.
The morphological disintegration of the term forgiveness, produces the word give. Forgiving of the offender is a gift to him. Although it is difficult to pray for an enemy and call for their happiness from the Almighty, Jesus Christ commanded Christians to pursue actively love one’s enemies, which is an invaluable step to emotional forgiveness (Luke 6: 20-4). Finally, committing to forgive, in which a person can make forgiveness a tangible event through an announcement of an intention. A letter I wrote to my offender was the culmination of this therapeutic forgiveness process.
Bibliography
Worthington Jr, Everett L. Forgiving and reconciling: Bridges to wholeness and hope. InterVarsity Press, 2009.