Lewis B. Smedes Quotes About Forgiveness

Quotes about: Forgiveness

• To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Inspirational, Happiness, Inspiring

• Forgiveness is God's invention for coming to terms with a world in which people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply. He began by forgiving us. And He invites us all to forgive each other.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hurt, People

• You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Forgiving
• 

  Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Broken Heart, Forgiveness, Heartbroken

  "Healing by Degrees" by Jean-Paul Bedard, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 1, 2014.

• You can forgive someone almost anything. But you cannot tolerate everything...We don't have to tolerate what people do just because we forgive them for doing it. Forgiving heals us personally. To tolerate everything only hurts us all in the long run.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Running, Hurt

• Vengeance is having a videotape planted in your soul that cannot be turned off. It plays the painful scene over and over again inside your mind...And each time it plays you feel the clap of pain again...Forgiving turns off the videotape of pained memory Forgiving sets you free.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Pain, Memories

• None of us wants to admit that we hate someone... When we deny our hate we detour around the crisis of forgiveness. We suppress our spite, make adjustments, and make believe we are too good to be hateful. But the truth is that we do not dare to risk admitting the hate we feel because we do not dare to risk forgiving the person we hate.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hate, Believe

• Forgive a wife-slammer if you can. But you don't have to live with him. Forgive a husband who is abusing your children if you can. But only after you kick him out of the house. And if you can't get him out, get help. It's available. In the meantime, don't let him near the kids, and don't let anyone tell you that if you forgive him it means you have to stay with him. [There's an important difference between forgiving a person and tolerating their bad behavior.]

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Husband, Children

• When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Letting Go, Evil

• Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator. Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us people should pay for the wrong they do. But forgiving is love's power to break nature's rule.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, People, Risk

• It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Inspirational, Forgiveness, Letting Go

• With a little time, and a little more insight, we begin to see both ourselves and our enemies in humbler profiles. We are not really as innocent as we felt when we were first hurt. And we do not usually have a gigantic monster to forgive; we have a weak, needy, and somewhat stupid human being. When you see your enemy and yourself in the weakness and silliness of the humanity you share, you will make the miracle of forgiving a little easier.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Stupid

• Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Memories, Healing

  "Healing by Degrees" by Jean-Paul Bedard, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 1, 2014.

• Forgiving does not usually happen at once. It is a process, sometimes a long one, especially when it comes to wounds gouged deep. And we must expect some lapses...some people seem to manage to finish off forgiving in one swoop of the heart. But when they do, you can bet they are forgiving flesh wounds. Deeper cuts take more time and can use a second coat.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Time, Heart

• The problem with revenge is that it never gets what it wants; it never evens the score. Fairness never comes. The chain reaction set off by every act of vengeance always takes its unhindered course. It ties both the injured and the injurer to an escalator of pain...Why do family feuds go on and on?...the reason is simple: no two people, no two families, ever weigh pain on the same scale.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Pain, Revenge

• ...Forgiving is not having to understand. Understanding may come later, in fragments, an insight here and a glimpse there, after forgiving.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Understanding, Forgiving

• When you give up vengeance, make sure you are not giving up on justice. The line between the two is faint, unsteady, and fine...Vengeance is our own pleasure of seeing someone who hurt us getting it back and then some. Justice, on the other hand, is secure when someone pays a fair penalty for wronging another even if the injured person takes no pleasure in the transaction. Vengeance is personal satisfaction. Justice is moral accounting...Human forgiveness does not do away with human justice.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Giving Up

• God invented forgiving as a remedy for a past that not even he could change and not even he could forget. His way of forgiving is the model for our forgiving.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Past, Forgiving

• If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have...they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Memories

• I worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse... People who have been wronged badly and wounded deeply should give themselves time and space before they forgive... There is a right moment to forgive. We cannot predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives... Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Pain, Order

• How many times should you forgive your household bruiser? You should not even think about forgiving him. Not yet. Not as long as he has his foot on your neck. Your problem at this point is not forgiving. Your problem is how to get out of his reach. Once you get away from him, you can think about forgiving him.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Thinking, Feet

• We attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt, endowing it with immortality. And we let it assault us every time it comes to mind. It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die-for it is a parasite sucking OUR blood, not theirs. There is only one remedy for it. [forgiveness]

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Hurt, Hate

• Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long... If we wait too long to forgive, our rage settles in and claims squatter's rights to our souls.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Rights, Long

• Gandhi was right: if we all live by 'an eye for an eye' the whole world will be blind. The only way out is forgiveness.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, Eye, World

• I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is.

  Lewis B. Smedes

  Forgiveness, People, Understanding

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