Freedom in Forgiveness: Discover the Healing in Letting Go by Sara BrunsvoldSample

Day 1

Revenge is a dish best never served.

What hurt do you carry? What has someone done or said that has left you scarred or unmoored? Forgiving those deep cuts, especially from someone close to you, is not easy or simple, nor does it happen overnight. Your soul may long to be like Jesus, but your flesh hungers to make the other person hurt as bad as you do.

Nikki Werner feels this tension between holy and human in the novel The Divine Proverb of Streusel. After thirty years of marriage, her dad has broken his vows, abandoned the family, and shattered every definition Nikki has of “family.” She attempts to reconstruct her sense of belonging and security during a summer-long stay in her late grandmother’s farmhouse, now owned by her uncle Wes. There she finds herself immersed in a multigenerational church community who teach her what the mothers before her also learned by walking the hard road of living.

Pain could be a security, hard to surrender, practically an identity. But if she were ever to know the height and depth and width and breadth of the mercy in which she was awash, she needed to give mercy too.

Her eyes open to her desperate need to give her pain over to Jesus, to trust him alone to right what has been made wrong and to bring together what has been scattered. She finds that no hurt caused by others can erase her worth in the eyes of her Creator. No teardown, no abandonment, no lie can compromise her heavenly Father’s secure grip. His love fills her wounded places and brings peace to the storms of her heart. Bitterness is replaced with stillness. Anger with love. Resentment with mercy. Tension with freedom.

Forgiveness, it turns out, is a choice to embrace the Father right back and to accept the riches of his love in place of the rot of the world.

Prayer

Lord God, you know how hard it is to release these feelings of betrayal and anger. I pray my love for you outgrows my desire to hold onto my pain. May it not become an idol, but instead may it be the reason I choose Jesus day by day until I see your face. Father, remind me I am your child and secure in your love. Be with the person who has hurt me. May their eyes be open to their need for your healing touch as well. Amen.