“Forgive others not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.” – Jonathan Lockwood Huie
When I first started writing my book Timeless, coming out on March 12th, the quote above served as the epigraph (the quote at the beginning of the book). In fact, the book was originally titled “Undeserving” because one of the major themes in the book is whether all people, all sins, deserve to be forgiven. (I ended up renaming the book because the third book in the series is called Unholy, and I thought it would be weird to have the titles of Book 2 and Book 3 start with “Un” when I couldn’t for the life of me think of an “Un” word for the title of Book 1, Amulet.)
In Timeless, the heroine, Erin Dovetree, is of the firm mindset that some things people do just can’t be forgiven. She reaffirms her belief every time she sees her father, because he is one of those people who has committed one of those sins. Her grandmother’s handsome landlord, Will Abbott, shares her conviction—not because of anything anyone has done to him, but because he cannot forgive himself for something he did years before.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about forgiveness over the course of my life, and as we start a New Year forgiveness is again on my mind. Although I’ve never (to my knowledge) hurt someone in a way that Erin Dovetree would consider unforgiveable or been hurt in such a way, I’ve come to realize that most often it’s the little things we do that end up being held against us and the little things done to us that we can’t seem to let go. It’s the little things we keep in our hearts that color our perceptions, distort our relationships, cause us to see things that aren’t there or turn thoughtless words or negligent actions into bigger, worse things than they may have been to start. And all those small things pile up, they stifle and overwhelm us, until we can’t take anymore. We close ourselves off, shut out that person, meter our love.
In the end, the things we choose not to forgive, those negative thoughts, words, and deeds that we allow to echo inside our minds and reside in our hearts, that we feed and nurture, that we use to justify our own action and inaction—those things poison us. They limit our capacity for joy, because they take up space that was meant for the positive things we could be experiencing instead. They divert us from what we could otherwise achieve, the good we could otherwise do.
On this first day of the year, instead of resolving to lose weight, find love, fix a leaky faucet, or get more sleep, let’s try to do a better job of letting the little things go. Let’s forgive the small offenses and forget words said in anger. Let’s do all in our power to heal ourselves and each other by remembering what is at the core of our relationships and focus on the things that matter. If we can do that—if we can learn to forgive the little things—we will be better equipped to forgive the big things when they happen. We will rid ourselves of bitterness and pain, allowing peace to enter in their place.
And peace is something we all deserve.
- Kathryn Amurra