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1 " Dear God Please take away my pain and despair of yesterday and any unpleasant memories and replace them with Your glorious promise of new hope. Show me a fresh HS-inspired way of relating to negative things that have happened. I ask You for the mind of Christ so I can discern Your voice from the voice of my past. I pray that former rejection and deep hurts will not color what I see and hear now. Help me to see all the choices I have ahead of me that can alter the direction of my life. I ask You to empower me to let go of the painful events and heartaches that would keep me bound. Thank You for Your forgiveness that You have offered to me at such a great price. Pour it into my heart so I can relinquish bitterness hurts and disappointments that have no place in my life. Please set me free to forgive those who have sinned against me and caused me pain and also myself. Open my heart to receive Your complete forgiveness and amazing grace. You have promised to bind up my wounds Psa 147:3 and restore my soul Psa 23:3 . Help me to relinquish my past surrender to You my present and move to the future You have prepared for me. I ask You to come into my heart and make me who You would have me to be so that I might do Your will here on earth. I thank You Lord for all that’s happened in my past and for all I have become through those experiences. I pray You will begin to gloriously renew my present. "
2 " May spending time with You be my first priority, may listening and obeying mark my life, may extravagant childlike joy and amazement mark my demeanor, may an openness to share your grace quickly and easily flow from me, may I seek your forgiveness and excitedly accept it. "
― Katie Kiesler Nelson , My Problem with Grace
3 " Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat......Forgiveness does not create a relationship. Unless people speak the truth about what they have done and change their mind and behavior, a relationship of trust is not possible. When you forgive someone you certainly release them from judgment, but without true change, no real relationship can be established.........Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive. But should they finally confess and repent, you will discover a miracle in your own heart that allows you to reach out and begin to build between you a bridge of reconciliation.........Forgiveness does not excuse anything.........You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness...... "
― William Paul Young , The Shack
4 " She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating. "
― Alexander McCall Smith , The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #14)
5 " For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:For everything under the sun there is a time.This is the season of your awkward harvesting,When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a placeYou had forgotten you knew from the inside out;And a time when that bitter tree was plantedThat has grown always invisibly beside youAnd whose branches your awakened handsNow long to disentangle from your heart.You are coming to see how your looking often darkenedWhen you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,How deep down your eyes were always owned by somethingThat faced them through a dark fester of thornsConverting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;You could only see what touched you as already torn.Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.And your memory is ready to show you everything,Having waited all these years for you to return and know.Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. You will have to scrape through all the layers of coveringAnd according to your readiness, everything will open. May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guideWho can accompany you through the fear and griefUntil your heart has wept its way to your true self.As your tears fall over that wounded place,May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.May your forgiveness still the hunger of the woundSo that for the first time you can walk away from that place, Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,And feel the clear, free air bless your new face. "
― John O'Donohue , To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
6 " Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. Forgiveness is you not letting your hate and anger rule your life. Because it will, whether you realize it or not. When you free the offender, you’re freeing yourself. Your forgiveness or lack of forgiveness has no effect on them. It’s your journey. It’s your struggle. "
7 " I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption. "