Thanks for your comments.

It is important to recognize that I am using the term “forget” in a metaphorical sense. There are some things that we can never forgot in terms of the actual occurrence of them. What I mean by “forget” is to not punish the person who caused the pain. By constantly punishing the person we hurt ourselves as much as them by keeping the pain alive. The essential idea of forgiveness is not to punish the other person.

Hope this helps

But I am not sure I can read this without some sort of questioning. You profess many times here that we must go beyond forgiveness and then forget the wrongs that have happened to us or that have been done to use by others. In all practicality I find that very difficult to endorse or practice.

I do not say this because I cannot cope with the idea of letting go of hurt or re-punishing myself. Rather I think that the biggest reason I cannot just forget is because my memory will not physically allow it. Similar to how war veterans suffer Post Traumatic Stress because they cannot forget horrors they experienced or saw, the mental stress of a very negative situation in life (divorce, infidelity, etc.) can cause memories to stay in your head whether you like it or not, and these memories can also be retriggered by unexpected sights or occurrences in everyday life. When things like this occur I feel that it is the God-given power of forgiveness and future hope that allow us to overcome the negative power of those memories. To me this is the idea of hitting the sin/negativity head on with the power of God to overcome it. I am not saying that I have fully mastered this technique or that it is easy to do, but I do feel that it is the better solution to dealing with negative past memories.

All this being said, I am not advocating that we harp on old, bad memories, but we should not feel as though we have failed if we are not able to forget about them.