Well, welcome back again to another podcast of Struggling Well. We're glad you've joined us again and, you know, Suzi, one of the things that I think you and I both have discovered by experience, but also we see it in the word of God is forgiveness is a funny thing. It's a hard thing. And you have some thoughts that you want to share with us about forgiveness or the lack of forgiveness and what it does to you as a person.
Yeah, I' it's been on my mind a lot and you know, we've had some situations in the not tooistant days of experiencing forgiveness, but I right away my mind went to and I'm probably divulging way too much here, but I'm going to go for it. I grew up in a home that was pretty chaotic. my mother was from Cuba and my father was a Polish second generation Polish from Pennsylvania. And my dad had nothing as far as monetarily and my mother came from a very wealthy home. in Cuba. How they met is I don't even know how they met. I mean, I know how they met, but it's an interesting story. However, let's fast forward. my mom came from a very wealthy family, but she was a wounded woman. Definitely a wounded woman.
And my dad, they had an interesting marriage. They stayed marriaged, married, excuse me, until they died, but they had an interesting marriage. And, if my brother were here, we could regail you with stories and tales about what it was like growing up in a home where there wasn't a lot of love, there was a lot of darkness. And anyway, my mom in her despair kind of took her woundedness and she had experienced some big trauma in her days. She took that out on my brother and myself and my dad was gone a lot. And so what that set up, and I really wasn't intending to go here this morning, but I'm just going to follow it. what it said set up was a lot of contention between us. My brother left the house before me cuz he was he's four years older than me, but there was a lot of chaos and a lot of tension in the house. And so as a kid, I just kept stuffing it away and stuffing it away. Fast forward, Jimmy and I are married. We've moved to our city and we are we have children and my parents decide to retire here. And I had very mixed feelings about that. Mostly because I wasn't sure how it was going to go with my mother. and a lot of things happened in the years that they lived here that were unfortunate, a lot of sad stuff. All that to say, my mother was getting on in years and ended up in a nursing home. And it was still hard for me to visit her and to be with her and cuz I had so much anger and disappointment and I'll speak for myself. But as God was working on my heart, cuz I really wanted him to do something with my mother. I wanted him to discipline her in some way or whatever. But let's bring it all the way to her being in her 90s in a nursing home. And I realized that as much damage as she had done, she was still made in the image of God. And that I needed to treat her with grace. And it felt foreign to me to treat this woman who there was so much bad history between she and I. How do I treat her with grace? And how do I forgive her? Because never in my life did she ever apologize for any of the things that she had done to myself or my brother. But in the last probably five years of her life, God just laid on my heart with such intensity how much I had been forgiven. And so as she spent the last 5 years of her life in a nursing home. And I know almost to the moment when my view of her changed. And as she is in that nursing home, I saw her in a different way. And it was purely an act of God. As God was bringing me to a place of looking at her through his eyes, I realized that my lack of forgiveness for what she had done, whether she apologized to me or not, that was on me and that I had been forgiven so much. How could I not forgive her? Whether she spoke and asked for it or not and so that theme and that did happen and actually as she was dying, she didn't want anybody but me. I can recall her grabbing my face with her hands. She couldn't she had lost the ability to speak, but she grabbed my face with her hands and tears just streamed down her face and I recall thinking Oh God, she is sorrowful over what has happened and she may not be able to express it to me, but you know what's in her heart and help me to love this woman in these last days and it released me. But it also taught me a lot about what unforgiveness does and how clear scripture is on what we are to do and how we are to live. And I want to take you to Ephesians in the 4 chapter when and I'm reading from the NLT version when Paul is saying to the church now that whole all of his letters were to the church but he's saying to them don't bring sorrow to God's holy spirit by the way you live remember he has identified you as his own guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption and then in verse 31 431 it says this get rid of all bitterness rage anger harsh words and slander as well as all types of evil behior Instead, instead be kind to each other, tender-hearted, forgiving one another just as God through Christ has forgiven you.
Yeah.
How do we not forgive then?
Yeah. And I as you're recounting this, which happened years ago, it comes back fresh to me and really believing that what happened between you and your mom at the end there, particularly your response to her, was the act of the Holy Spirit in you. there's no way humanly speaking and we're not going to do that. But if you went into all the details of all the hurt that had been visited on you by her you would have had no reason to live the way you did in those last years of her life except that you had given ground for the Holy Spirit to be at work in your life. And it was a beautiful picture.
You know when I think about Jesus on the cross and we know this by wrote those of us that are believers, we know by wrote that he died and he took all of our sins on him. But we really need to sit with that and really understand not just my sin, your sin, Tim's sin, the whole world's sin. He paid for it in those days of dragging the being beaten to a pulp, being dragged dragging that cross, being on the cross, being separated from the father because of the weight of his sin and so then I you cross me and I carry it around for years or and I don't forgive one another other people. And why? I don't get it. What does it do?
You know, it's I think it for us it's trying to justify we try to justify how we feel and therefore we build up our reasoning why we can't or we won't forgive somebody. truth is we hang on to that long enough it we it develops it can develop into a bitterness and a just an ugliness in our own heart which is really our responsibility to deal with.
Yeah. And we and I know this I'm just speaking for myself. When I hang on to something, it doesn't benefit me. I think it's going to like hurt that other person and they're going to pay for what they did. But it doesn't work out that way. And if that were the case, then Jesus would never have gone to the cross. God would never have sent his son because all we did was sin against him from the get-go. And when I read in Exodus, and I mean, the Bible is an unbelievable book. I know that sounds goofy, but it's true. I read in Exodus 14 where the Lord has spoken to Moses, and Moses is saying to the people, "Yahweh, the Lord, the God of compassion and mercy, is slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. That's my God.
Yeah.
And that's how I am to live. I am to live with compassion and mercy and be slow to anger. I What would our world look like today if that were the case?
Yeah. And so your illustration of your situation with your mom was one that goes back years for us. in 2025, we've experienced maybe not as dramatic a release of anger and forgiveness that has come in a situation more recent for you and me that we both have talked about how it has lifted a burden off of us that was definitely there. Maybe not even one that we recognized every day, but it has lifted a burden from our shoulders that is very freeing, which I think is what forgiveness does. Obviously, when God forgave us through Christ, it freed us from the weight of our sin. and the penalty that was justly ours because of what Christ did for us. And I love this phrase. I use it all the time. He did for us what we could never do for ourselves.
Yeah.
And so when I stop and think as you said about his forgiveness and that becomes the standard for my need to forgive others and to be forgiven. it's an amazing picture.
Holding on to it does nothing for your soul. It does nothing for your physical body. does nothing for your mental health. but it is hard to live that way. You cannot do it without the Holy Spirit.
No, it's when somebody says it's humanly impossible, I would go, you're absolutely right.
Yes.
It takes the supernatural work of the spirit. But so, so where you are today in your life, we don't know. we're sitting here in our kitchen and don't know what's going on in the lives of the people who are listening. But if forgiveness of someone else is something that you need to consider, something that you need to do. I would just say be reminded today of the forgiveness you've experienced from Christ and let that be the standard by how you look at others who need to be forgiven or if you need to be forgiven. may he may that be the standard and may it also be for you the realization that it only comes through the work of the Holy Spirit in your heart.
Thank you so much for listening and we hope you have a great week. Thanks for joining us. To learn more about the Struggling Well podcast, visit tandemspirituality. com.