“Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, long suffering; bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do.” Colossians  3:12-13

All of us have experienced hurt in our lives. Sometimes these hurts stung and cut us deep within our soul. In the midst of the hurt, others seek to give us advice. Two phrases come to mind that people express during a time of hurt either by themselves or others share as advice. The first phrase is “forgive, forget and move on.” The other phrase is “I’ll forgive but I won’t forget.”

Did you know that these two phrases really go hand in hand? Yes, we need to forgive to remove the control the hurt and the person has over our lives at that moment. We need to give the hurt to God and allow him to heal it and we do need to move on in our journey.

Now, what about the not forgetting? Once we have forgiven and moved on, it is important to extend a hand of forgiveness and Christ-like love to the person who hurt us. But, we must not forget what brought the hurt into play not to have as a revenge when something happens but to know what lead to the hurt to begin with. In this type of remembering, we are taking the hurtful experience and turning it into a learning experience in order to avoid getting hurt or hurting someone else ourselves.

This is a great post by April over at Thoughts from the Porch. This is an excellent article on forgiveness, we need to forgive…but not necessarily forget. Explore this article for answers!

To finish reading this article, please head over to http://aprilhawk.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/forgive-and-forget/. While you are there, why not check out the rest of April’s site? Let her know something you read there blessed you.