Forgiveness Is a Choice, Not a Feeling
"For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you."
— Matthew 6:14
The first time God asked me to forgive someone, my answer was no.
Not a dramatic, fist-raised-at-the-sky no. Just a quiet, honest, deeply human no. A I hear You and I am not ready and I don't know if I want to be kind of no.
And I think that's where a lot of us actually live when forgiveness stops being a concept and starts being a requirement. When it stops being something we agree with in theory and becomes something God is asking us to practice with the specific person who caused us the most specific pain.
That's a different conversation entirely. And that's the one we're going to have.
What Forgiveness Actually Is
Before we go any further, let's establish what we're actually talking about. Because I think a lot of the confusion around forgiveness starts with a misunderstanding of what it is and isn't.
Forgiveness is a conscious choice to release resentment and anger toward someone who has wronged you. That's it at its core. It is not a feeling. It is not forgetting. It is not excusing what happened or pretending the hurt wasn't real. It is not a pass for bad behavior or an invitation for more of it. It is a deliberate, willful decision to release what you have every human right to hold onto.
And that's exactly what makes it so hard.
Because the resentment? It feels justified. The anger? It makes sense. When someone has genuinely wronged you — when the pain they caused is real and documented and still living in your body long after the circumstances have changed — holding onto it doesn't feel like bitterness. It feels like accountability. It feels like the only honest response to what actually happened.
So when God asks you to release it, the first questions that rise up are — why would I? And how could I?
Those aren't faithless questions. Those are human ones. And I believe God is big enough to handle them.
Healing Begins Where We Least Expect It
I want you to think about physical injury for a moment. When you hurt yourself — a sprain, a wound, something that needs real attention — healing doesn't begin with comfort. It begins with treatment. And treatment is often the part that hurts most.
You apply pressure before you get relief. You go through the procedure before you get to recovery. The path to healing runs directly through the thing that is hardest to face.
Emotional and spiritual healing works the same way. If we were to trace the journey of healing back to its very beginning — its first step, its starting point — what would we find?
Forgiveness.
Not as the destination. As the door.
You cannot sleep forgiveness away. You cannot party it away, drink it away, or spend enough money to make it disappear. I know because I've watched people try all of those things. I've been tempted by some of them myself. But the hurt doesn't leave through any of those exits. It just finds somewhere deeper to live inside you.
Forgiveness is the door. And the only way through it is a choice.
The Hardest Question
So here's the question that forgiveness actually begins with. Not "how do I forgive" — that comes later. The first question is simpler and harder at the same time:
Do I actually want to?
Do I truly want to forgive this person? Do I want to release my resentment toward them? Do I want to let go of what I have been holding?
And I want to be honest with you — my instant answer was no. It probably will be yours too. And that's okay. That is not a character flaw. That's just what it feels like to be human in the middle of real pain.
For me, the forgiveness God was asking me to practice wasn't abstract. It was deeply, specifically personal. It involved someone whose actions had caused real damage — to me, to people I love deeply, in ways I still carried in my body long after the circumstances had changed. And when I felt God asking me to forgive, I didn't feel relief or peace or any of the things we associate with spiritual growth.
I felt resistance.
And then something shifted into focus.
I realized that what I was actually facing was a choice. Not simply between forgiving and not forgiving — it was bigger than that. I felt like I had to choose between my hurt and my God. Between holding onto my pain — which felt valid and justified and mine — and holding onto Jesus.
Did He mean more to me than my anger did? Was my resentment more important to me than my relationship with God? Was keeping this person accountable through my bitterness worth more than the freedom God was offering me?
I want to be clear, these questions didn't come from a place of guilt or shame. They came from a place of genuine wrestling. Because both things felt real. The pain was real. And God was and is real. And they were pulling in opposite directions.
That is the moment forgiveness begins. Not when it feels easy. Not when the other person deserves it. Not when you've fully processed everything. It begins in that exact tension — where you choose, even when you don't want to, even when you don't feel ready, even when it costs you something to say yes.
Can I Speak to You Directly For a Moment?
Maybe you're reading this and thinking — Abi, you don't know what they did to me.
And you're right. I don't.
I don't know the full weight of what was done to you. I don't know how many times it happened or how long you carried it alone or how many nights it kept you up or how deeply it changed you. I don't know the specific face you see when forgiveness comes up or the specific memory that still makes your chest tighten.
But I want you to hear this clearly — none of that is in question here. The pain is real. The wrong was real. What happened to you mattered and it is not being minimized in this conversation.
This isn't about deciding whether what they did was okay. It wasn't. This is about what you do with what they did. Because right now it is living inside you — taking up space, shaping your days, costing you something. And you deserve to decide what happens next.
That decision starts with one question. Not how. Not when. Just —
Do I want to be free?
You Don't Have to Feel It to Choose It
This is the part I really want you to hold onto today.
Forgiveness is a choice before it is ever a feeling. You will not wake up one morning and simply feel forgiving toward the person who hurt you. That is not how this works. What happens instead is that you make the choice — imperfectly, maybe tearfully, maybe through gritted teeth — and then you keep making it. Every time the memory surfaces. Every time the anger comes back. Every time you feel the full weight of what was done to you.
You choose again.
And slowly — not all at once, not in a straight line — something begins to shift. Not because you manufactured the feeling but because God honors the willingness. He meets you in the choice and He does what only He can do with it.
We'll talk more about that — about what God does when we say yes — as this series continues. Because forgiveness doesn't end with the choice. The choice is just the beginning.
But today, this is where I want to leave you.
Not with a resolution. Not with a tidy ending. Just with this question sitting gently in your heart:
Is there someone — or something — that God has been quietly asking you to forgive? And what has been making it hard to say yes?
You don't have to have the answer today. You just have to be willing to sit with the question.
That willingness? That's where healing starts.
Until next time, Abi 🤍
This is Part 1 of the Forgiveness Series. Part 2 — coming soon — will explore why Jesus asks us to forgive and what God's own forgiveness has to do with ours.
