The Big Hurt
Even my best friend, the one I trusted completely, the one who shared my food, has turned against me. Psalm 41:9 NLT
Unless you’ve lived your whole life out in the boonies completely isolated from people, you’ve probably had one:
a big wound in your heart from someone who’s wronged you.
One of the sad realities of life is that hurting people hurt people, and it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of that!
Wrongs done to us are either valid (it genuinely happened) or perceived (we interpret another’s actions in a way that brings us hurt). Either way, we can get wounded by people’s words and actions, and being hurt is an awful feeling.
There’s a period of time after we go through a hurtful situation when our emotions are heightened and raw.
Anger and defensiveness are common. So is the desire to spew to everyone how we have been wronged. Our minds don’t want to shut off. Our heads are filled with speeches we’d like to make. We review detail upon detail of interactions we’ve had with the person who hurt us. We go out of the way to prove to ourselves and others that we were wronged. And sometimes we get in there and make things worse by saying or doing something we shouldn’t.
Yes, we’ve all been there. And we’ve all had a choice that follows our hurtful event—a fork in the road, so to speak. We’ve all had to decide what to do with our hurt—either to forgive our offender or to not forgive them.
The fork in the road: to forgive or not to forgive.
Forgiving is rarely a first response to hurt. The problem is that sometimes we feel that to forgive our offender means that we are brushing off what they did and saying that it didn’t matter. But that’s not true: it did matter! Why else would we have been so offended?
Probably the most common response to our big hurts is to simply suffer through them until the pain starts to fade. We “pull up our big girl panties” and deal with things somehow. We stuff the pain or manage it through various coping mechanisms that we think help us—drinking, eating, isolating, rebounding into another relationship, overworking, etc.
As time passes, somehow we convince ourselves that we’ve let it all go. We assure others we have left that baggage behind. However, when those old hurts get brought up, there’s a bitter edge to our words. All kinds of yuck gets stirred up when we revisit what happened. Is it forgiven? Have we truly let it go? Well, if it’s still causing pain, I’d say you’ve either not forgiven yet, or you’re still in process. It’s still packed away inside.
For the sake of our health—physically, mentally, and spiritually—it’s important to truly forgive.
In my novel, Loving Leah, Leah Labanora was genuinely and deeply wounded by her ex-fiancé, Jake DeSoto. There was no glossing over it and making it go away. In her inability to deal with her pain, Leah cut off her relationships with anyone who knew Jake and turned to medicate herself with partying and unhealthy relationships. Intertwined with her pain was the lie that God had somehow set her up to be humiliated. She felt that God had abandoned her and didn’t protect her when the awful event that happened.
Leah’s inability to deal with her hurt left her in victim mode for a long time, although as a believer in Jesus, she was wracked with guilt. Leah knew what the Bible said about refusing to forgive your brother from your heart.
As Leah withheld forgiveness, her walk with God stalled out—and naturally so, for the message of the gospel is all about forgiveness: God forgiving us through Jesus Christ, and in turn us forgiving others who are undeserving of forgiveness too.
But back to the fork in the road…
Forgiveness is hard. Our sinful flesh stubbornly wants to choose the other path. The path of blame and bitterness. The path of letting things fade with time, of trying to forget about it and move on. The path of not addressing our own issues. Our bruised emotions don’t want to forgive. We want to accuse instead. But to walk in bitterness is sin.
Forgiveness is the better way. We’ll discuss what it looks like in Forgiving the Big Hurt.
For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. Matthew 6:14-15
In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed. This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart. Matthew 18:35
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