Forgiveness

There are many times in life when we apologize, when we ask for forgiveness, when we want to move forward without further hurt, and we say that we are sorry. We ask another person to forgive us, to realize that we each have of our own faults, and we each will make our own mistakes.

“I think you must forgive,” Grandma Gritty told me the other night at dinner. I asked her how to do this. All of the sudden I felt the weight of this question – How do I forgive someone? Every day here in Ghana we must forgive one another for our misunderstandings, for our shortcomings, for the little things and for the big things. And some days it is easier than others.

Forgiveness and forgetting are not the same: one takes time, the other is avoidance; one makes us stronger, the other weaker; one requires us to be rational and the other is irrational. But how do you do it? How do you forgive and move forward?

For the first time, this is a question I have to answer for myself.

I can’t run away from life, from things going on back in the U.S., from everyone or anyone and I don’t want to. But it also means that while I am here, there are moments that happen there, that will affect me – whether it is now or when I return. And now, is my time for learning.

I talk in the abstract, this is what I am thinking, not directed at anyone or for anyone, not one moment, not one experience – but that for the past year I have been trying to learn how to forgive, and only now am I understanding that I haven’t.

And I am realizing that I also must ask forgiveness for all that I have done.