When someone deeply hurts you, quite often it leaves you with a feeling that they owe you something. Most of the time, the people who hurt you don't realize what they have done. Let me ask you something. Do you really think other people are planning their life around hurting you? The truth is very seldom does someone intentionally set out to hurt another person. Yes, sometimes they do, but that is usually not the case.

Typically people hurt you because they are insensitive, rude, or angry. If you allow this to make you so mad that your evenings at home are spent stewing over the situation, then you have allowed yourself to accept the devil's bait.

While you're miserable and upset, the person who has hurt you is probably at Shoney's having a good time and not even thinking about you. They may even be enjoying a piece of strawberry pie with whipped cr me on it while you are at home taking Rolaids and trying to keep the pain in your stomach under control. You must understand that letting go of hurts in your life has no bearing on the other person. It's something you must do with yourself.

While counseling a married couple, the wife accused her husband saying, "You owe me." Although he had hurt her for fifteen years, it was not within his power to give those years back. When somebody owes you a debt that they cannot pay, the only thing you can do is forgive the debt because it's not within human power to change the past.

Another woman hated her deceased father who had molested her. She refused to forgive him because she felt that he "owed her" because he had stolen her innocence. I couldn't help but think, "How much does he owe you? What are you going to do, dig up his grave and pawn the gold ring off his finger?" The reality is, the deceased father could not pay his daughter back. He's dead and gone. She now has the responsibility to forgive the debt.

Forgiveness means to absolve from payment or cancel a debt. If you have been seriously hurt, you might as well forgive and cancel the debt because there's nothing you can do to change the past. How long do you plan to live with the pain in your heart? Although you can't change the past, you can change your response to it.

Cancel the debt and be free. "Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 3:13-14)

Devotion 0384