Monday, March 31, 2025
“Forgive Someone Else”
We have begun the fourth week of Lent, so if you’ve made a Lenten Commitment, you might already be more than halfway through! On the other hand, if you haven’t chosen to do anything specific for God this Lent, that’s okay. This is the perfect time and day to begin.
Our Challenge today is to forgive someone else. This is one of the more difficult Daily Challenges we’ll face this year. Why? It’s not easy to forgive someone for the pain they’ve caused us, especially when we are right. No matter who we are, we have a great desire to be correct.
This is a topic that could be stretched in many ways. For instance, sometimes we want to be more than right. We want to be proven correct, and we want an apology. Then, at times, we want the other person to make a full admission of guilt, requiring them to provide a complete understanding of the specifics involved, as if it will somehow make us feel better. Other times, we push it so far that we require a public apology and statement of our righteousness so that we can be justified in an embarrassment (or even slander) that we experienced.
Forgiving someone can be tricky, often because we will only offer it under certain circumstances. We tend to put conditions on our forgiveness, some of which are so restrictive that forgiveness can never be granted. Yes, yes…this is all basic stuff, but this is also very difficult.
True forgiveness, like the forgiveness God offers to each of us, doesn’t come with conditions or requirements (Thank God!). Instead, the forgiveness that God offers is provided to us out of God’s goodness, not our potential for good behavior or understanding of the bad thing we did.
Today’s Challenge for Lent is to forgive someone for what they did to us. Don’t worry about making them apologize. Don’t even worry about making contact with them (although that would be fine if we did). Instead, let’s go to God in prayer and seek to forgive that person from the purest intentions of love and grace.
We can do this one. It won’t be easy, but we’ll be surprised at how much accomplishing this one task will help our day, week, and a lifetime of well-being.
“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” (Colossians 3:13, NIV)
