Chuck Bryant

Like it's not, it's just a thing that happened in your life rather than this crisis that is sucking up your attention and emotions.

Yeah, I really like this definition from Fred Luskin, who is a psychologist and forgiveness expert for what it's worth.

director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects.

And Fred's definition is to forgive is to give up all hope for a better past.

And that really lays it out there in a very practical sense that what has happened has happened.

You may not be there yet.

in your journey to forgiveness or the letting go, but you cannot change what happened no matter how angry you are or how much you want someone to pay for it or suffer or how much revenge you want.

So there is no better past.

That's impossible.

So giving up hope for a better past, it's sort of a bleak definition, but one that I think is pretty instructive.

Yeah, but it's also a realistic definition too, if you think about it, because you can't change the past one way or another.

You can only alter how you let the past continue to affect you or not.

And the other thing I really want to say here right now, because it can be confusing for me too,

When I think about forgiveness and anger and stuff like that is like, this is not, no one is talking about something like throwing a switch or like rather than feeling anger, you feel forgiveness.

That's actually counterproductive as we'll see.

Like you can't replace anger with forgiveness.

Forgiveness is meant to come after anger because you use anger or hurt or resentment or whatever your version of that is.

to protect and guard your own boundaries.

So it's unnatural for you to not have some sort of negative emotion or negative response to being wronged.

But you don't want to replace that or try to replace it with forgiveness because you may accidentally trip up the process and you're not really legitimately feeling forgiveness.