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Father Len shares the forgiveness method he uses along with his experiences learning to forgive.
Highlights, Ideas and Wisdom
- Father Len confesses that he is “not great at forgiving,” but he’s working on it.
- Forgiveness is a skill that can be learned just like all the other virtues.
- Forgiving is like an exercise, the more you do it, the better you get.
- If you learn to forgive small things, you build up the forgiveness muscle so that later you can forgive other things.
- The LETGO forgiveness method Father Len uses has five steps:
- L – Look deeply at what went wrong.
- E – Apply Empathy
- T – Tell a better story
- G – Give forgiveness
- O – One more day to remember choosing to forgive.
- You may not be able to forgive immediately after an insult or injury because you need time to mourn.
- Anger prevents forgiveness.
- Prolonged anger can turn into bitterness.
- Anger is a reaction to a feeling. You can train yourself to replace anger with forgiveness.
- Forgetting the insult or injury is not the same as forgiveness.
- If you don’t give yourself time to really feel the pain of the injury or insult, it can become easy to hide behind anger.
- Quick compulsive forgiveness may actually be fake forgiveness and a form of denial of the insult or injury as well as a sign that you’re more comfortable being a doormat.
- Empathy is thinking about what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes and awareness of their pain.
- Stories change our opinions, not evidence.
- Stories with a message of hope cause the greatest change.
- Telling the same story to yourself over and over carves a deep rut in your memory. That can be good or bad.
- We must learn how to forgive ourselves for stupid things we’ve done.
- Praying that you’ll have a sincere desire for forgiveness, even if you don’t have the ability, God will answer that prayer.
- Releasing an expectation that is causing you to suffer is a significant element in the forgiveness process.