What is forgiveness? Forgiveness is a decision. It is the act of being willing to let go of your past and letting yourself move on with your life.

Some people view forgiving as an act of weakness, but it actually provides you with strength and freedom. When we hold on to grudges, hatred or resentment towards anyone we will ultimately do a great deal of damage to ourselves.

Forgiveness is about freeing yourself from what has happened to you. What we have to understand is that what has happened to us is in our past, and it will remain a part of our past, and that’s okay. But we are not living in the past. When we think about issues from our past and they still bring pain to us today, then we have not truly forgiven.

What we have to remember forgiveness is a choice. Forgiveness is something you can do on your own; you don’t need to speak to the person. You have to make the choice on your own to release the pain. We can’t change the past, or what happened to us in the past. The only thing we can control is how we are going to deal with the pain that was brought to us.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you ~ Lewis B. Smedes

We learn as children to accept people for who they are. This is also what we have to do to forgive someone. Sometimes others can’t see what they are doing to us, because they have so much of their own pain that they have not dealt with. We have to see them for who they are.

We can’t change or control others, or their behavior, but we can control how we interact with them. We can also choose how much we let them into our lives, or if we really don’t need to have them in our lives at all. Either way, we can still forgive them.

The path to love in any form is forgiveness.