Do you ever feel forgiven?

I’ve walked many miles in those shoes. The process is going to be different for everyone but…

I feel god’s forgiveness when I reach the point where I can forgive myself.

I feel I can forgive myself when I reach the point where I can forgive others.

This is a very interesting question.

I agree with Nibbler’s statement.

I’ve told this story before but, I’m telling it again. (abbreviated version)

I didn’t grow up in the church. I got into a lot of trouble growing up & embarrassed my family in the process.

I always felt bad about my past & our family never talked about it.

I went to college & in my Senior year I joined the church. About 2 yrs later married my wife married & began to raise our family.

We were Stake Missionaries & taught the discussions. We taught what forgiveness is & how to apply it in our

investigator’s lives. Little did I know that I didn’t know how to apply it in my own life.

In the back of my mind I always looked back at my youth with regret & guilt.

A couple years before my Mother’s death, she was visiting us & she was reviewing her life & how our families had grown

over the years. (Remember, she was not a member.) She made the statement “I never had a bit of trouble with you kids when

you were growing up”. Being me, I couldn’t let that statement pass. So, I reminded her of my youth & the things I did.

When I looked into her face, I could see that she didn’t know what I was talking about. It was almost like I was speaking a foreign language.

Then I could see that she remembered & her response was “Oh Michael, that was nothing”. She had forgiven me years ago & I

was carrying the guilt around for decades.

For me, this is my definition of forgiveness. I would love to look into the eyes of the Savior & see if I’ve been forgiven or not during

the sacrament. When I can’t, I remember my Mother & the conversation we had.

This is an interesting story I recently read by Bro Uchtdorf titled: Can You Hear the Music?

https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dieter-f-uchtdorf/can-you-hear-the-music/

Thanks for sharing and reminding us of that great talk.

As my own children have grown into adulthood I have also recognized that things I have long forgotten and/or forgiven are sometimes still present in their minds. Perhaps our relationship with our Heavenly Parents is similar. See next post.

I’ve struggled with this a lot too and suffered from scrupulosity on my mission. For me after my faith crisis started one of the positive things that happened was that I stopped feeling so guilty all the time. A lot of the burden of guilt came from my own beliefs about myself, rather than God punishing me or the Spirit making me feel guilty.

I think feeling forgiven by God after prayer only works if the feeling of guilt comes from God. Then the feeling would go away as soon as he forgives you. But if the feeling comes from yourself, then even if God forgives you it might not erase the guilt. You would have to forgive yourself for that.

I used to think that my feelings of guilt were the Spirit telling me I still hadn’t fully repented, but I’ve now realized a lot of it is just me not forgiving myself.

I don’t know if I’ve really ever felt forgiven by God, and these days I’m not even sure if there is a God, but I guess I just hope that if there is a God who is loving and merciful then he will forgive my mistakes as long as I’m trying to do what’s right. So I don’t really feel forgiven, but I don’t feel as much guilt any more either.

I feel god’s forgiveness when I reach the point where I can forgive myself.

I feel I can forgive myself when I reach the point where I can forgive others.

I’ll rep this as well.

Has God been forgiving me? I have no confirmation one way or the other. I figure my spiritual dyslexia doesn’t allow me to recognize His personal communications.

That leaves what I can do

– forgive everyone by default

– detach shame from failure, limits and ignorance (remove impediments to self-forgiveness)

– proactively, unconditionally apologize & account for harm I cause

SD, it’s a great question.

How does it work for you?

I’ll toss out my view, but I recognize that this is different from others, so I caveat this all with: whatever works for you is fine with me.

I don’t think of the Atonement has having anything at all to do with forgiveness. I don’t think of receiving forgiveness as an element of our spirituality. For me, forgiveness is a very important aspect of Christianity, but only as it pertains to forgiving others, and not about being forgiven. This is similar to how I view the Golden Rule. In the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, Jesus is said to have taught that we should treat others with kindness, even knowing, and especially when, it will not be reciprocated. For me, Christian forgiveness follows the same line of thinking: We forgive, we don’t expect to be or need to be forgiven.

As for the Atonement, I don’t view it in terms of repentance or forgiveness, but as a way to becoming ‘like’ God. Paul talked about the “Ministry of Reconciliation”, in which God “reconciled us to himself through Christ” and he urged the Corinthians to “be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). The unfortunate use of the word “reconcile” in renaissance-era translations, makes this sound like a restoration of something that existed before, just the same way that ‘repent’ does, since they are both RE words in English. The implication is that something has happened to turn us from God and we need to get back to before that happened. This is strongly held in LDS thought.

However, the original sense of ‘reconciliation’, in Paul’s own language, ‘katallageis’, was to be changed to be like God, exchanged, brought into alignment with, or to become friends with God… to be ‘catalogued’ with God. It doesn’t assume any prior bad act or loss. Paul’s view, as far as I can tell, was that we human beings are not naturally like God, but because of Christ’s Atonement, we can become like him through a New (spiritual) Life. Paul, again, according to my reading, didn’t think of ‘sin’ as something we do against God, but rather, just mundane human foibles that we could set aside without regard when we move into a spiritual Life in Christ.

To me, the Christian purpose of the Atonement is to provide a way to something new, not a way back to something old. Forgiveness of past ‘sins’ wasn’t a view of the Atonement in early Christian thought. The concept of Christ suffering as an offering for our sins (and in our place) didn’t appear until much later. IMO, the Atonement is more about the death of the this-worldly form and being raised into a spiritual life. God calls us “to be conformed to the image of His [spiritually-alive] Son (Romans “. IMHO, you don’t need to be forgiven to follow Jesus as the ‘forerunner’ into the presence of and communion with God (Hebrews), or to become a part of the Family of Christ; as Paul says in Romans, Jesus is the “Firstborn within a large family”.

I never feel forgiven.

SD, can you explain this further? I know you’re talking about forgiveness but, Is there anything that brings you inspiration?

Yes — I guess I never know one way or the other if God has forgiven me of the mistakes I make. There comes a point when I forgive myself — I know when that happens — I am able to brush off the infraction as learning, or unintentional. But I never know what God thinks of the infraction, or if he has forgiven me. I have read stories about people feeling burdens lifted after praying for forgiveness, or other spiritual manifestations (even minor ones), but I never feel that I’ve been forgiven. I will go to my grave unsure of what God has forgiven me of and what he hasn’t.

I will say that I have greater confidence I’ve been forgiven if I haven’t done something bad for a really long time. It’s as if it’s no longer part of my character so I usually feel like I shouldn’t be beating myself up over the thing again. But that is SD forgiving SD, not God forgiving SD.

I think we have define “forgiven” before we can answer the question. We also have to know the rule (spoken or unspoken, civic or cultural, divine or mortal) that we broke AND acknowledge the validity of the rule with the authority to impose consequences (stated and unstated). Completing actions required by the consequences is also required.

To me, there are 2 almost contradictory ideas involved for forgiveness:

1. Casting Away/Letting Go – Jan Karon’s Father Tim expresses it best I feel in this paraphrased statement “I give up my right to hurt you because you hurt me.” The formulation of and acting on a specific course of action in response to being hurt.

2. Acceptance – Being able to accept that we did something hurtful because of who we are as individuals and “moving on” as it were – accepting it without shame as part of our past to learn how to make better choices from.

NOTE: As with most things, we will go through the stages of grief (more or less) to get here. In this case, I think the grief is because we mourn the loss of the expectations we could not reach (for whatever reason).

God (assuming God exists) and I aren’t on speaking terms right now, so I don’t know the status of forgiveness between God and myself, or whether it matters.

Do I feel forgiven by others? Yes.

Do I forgive others? Mostly. But in all honesty, most of my “forgiveness” is assessing and re-assessing what the person)s) who hurt me are capable of (did they mean it, etc) and revising my expectations accordingly. It also includes setting up boundaries (either on my emotions, on my reactions, or on my choices) to minimize repeated hurts and act/react in a way that is in line with my core values.

SMALL STAKES EXAMPLE:

My 10.75 year old daughter says mean/careless things designed to make me mad pretty much daily. (The funniest one to me is being called a “Pacifist” because I refused to fight with her.)

In the moment, I can get angry and I know that I need to react in a way that respects what I value and teaches her a better way to react – while recognizing that she is trying to figure out who she is and that her brain is in the process of moving all of her reasoning to the more limited brain stem for several years of remodeling. So, in the moment I am assessing where she is emotionally, what her motivations are that are driving this behavior, and what consequences imposed by me (formal and informal) will help her to become a better person. Because I believe strongly in creating “win-win” situations for everyone that I come in contact with, I usually tell her that I will not fight with her, but that when she is ready, I am happy to talk with her. For deliberately disrespectful/borderline malicious comments that come from a motivation of trying to hurt me, specific consequences (time-out, restitution and apology) are imposed. And I usually look for food/drink or something else to help her move herself into a different state of mind less inclined towards disrespectful comments. And most of the time later on, I get extra hugs/connection out of remorse for her earlier disrespectful/independence claiming choices.

Did I forgive her? Yes – Probably within minutes of the disrespectful comments. I let go of my right to hurt her because she hurt me because I can relate to where she is developmentally in this process. I accepted that she is going to do things like this. BUT, I try to verbalize/impose natural consequences in part because she needs to learn that there are more effective ways to handle her thoughts to get what she wants.

Does she feel forgiven? I think so. It usually takes several hours longer for her to get there. It also requires her to let go of hurting me and process the shame she feels for making those choices.