Process Questions (from Embracing Forgiveness, Morehouse Education Resources):

Barbara states:

“Everybody has something about forgiveness. There’s somebody [who] did something terrible you can’t get past, or maybe you did something you can’t forgive yourself for, or [there’s] someone else [who] can’t forgive you.”

What is the first thing that comes to mind for you in this matter of forgiveness? What personal involvement in forgiving is still unfinished for you?

Barbara explains:

“This idea of ‘forgiving as we have been forgiven’ —maybe what it’s saying is if you forgive, you will know what it is to be forgiven, and if you don’t forgive, you won’t be able to accept this gift. “It’s not that I (God) am not giving it to you—I (God) am giving it to you all the time—it’s that you won’t be able to accept it.”

When have you experienced the power of forgiveness in the way that Barbara is describing? When have you received the gift of this reciprocal relationship between forgiving and being forgiven?

Barbara suggests:

“What makes forgiveness so impossible for us is the way anger functions in us over

time. It latches on. It lands in the heart and makes like a tumor there. Over time it makes its own blood supply and pretty soon it can’t be removed. It’s gotten too deep; it’s become a part of you and you feel as if you’d die. There are tumors like that; there are inoperable tumors you can’t excise because you’d kill the patient. Anger, the holding of a grudge, the lack of forgiveness is a tumor—a growth in the spiritual body.”

When have you experienced the persistent presence of anger as a kind of tumor that makes it increasingly difficult to move to forgiveness?

Barbara tells us:

“The lack of forgiveness that we experience is really an opportunity for us to come closer to God in asking for help. It makes us better than we were. That’s paradoxical.  ‘You mean this thing that I had, this sin of mine that I couldn’t forgive or wouldn’t forgive or that I could not get free from—my own shame—that thing is a means of grace?’ Why, yes.”

When have you experienced the grace of God as a gift of one of these situations that seemed to be completely lacking in grace?

Barbara assures us:

 “I can’t do much about what happened in the past, but I have a lot to say about who I’m going to be now and who I’m going to walk with. It’s hard for us to choose life sometimes, but we can still make that choice and we have help. We don’t have to do it all alone.”

 What’s one choice you are sitting with right now that could make a difference about how you move forward with life and with the possibility of grace? How will you remember that you are not alone?