Praying for the person who hurt your friend is harder than praying for the one who hurt you. Try anyway.
GRATITUDE
WHAT THIS MEANS
Anger on somebody else’s behalf feels clean, because it looks like loyalty rather than grievance. That is what makes it so hard to put down. Your own injury you can decide to release. Your friend’s feels like it is not yours to release, so you keep holding it for them, long after they have stopped. Loosening it is worth considering mostly because of what the holding does to you.
You can stay firmly on your friend’s side and still stop rehearsing the case against the other person. Try it once this week, badly and unconvincingly, and notice that your loyalty survives it.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Whose hurting of your friend do you find impossible to forgive?
MORE IN FAITH, GRACE & PURPOSE
- You don’t need a mission trip to serve. Your neighbor’s yard is closer than another country.
- Samuel heard his name in the night and thought it was the old priest calling. God’s voice can sound ordinary at first.
- Mowing a neighbor’s lawn and edging it even though they’d never notice? That’s doing it for God.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.