Sometimes in life, we are confronted with situations that necessitate our forgiveness. It’s not always simple to forgive someone who has wronged you or damaged you in ways you didn’t realize were possible. It can be difficult to forgive someone. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Perhaps we are making things difficult for ourselves. After all, forgiving someone changes you rather than them.
Humans of New York, a renowned social media site, published a story about a non-existent relationship between a man and his father. The tale was fantastic, but it was one of the comments below that blew up the Internet. Jennifer Thomas responded with her daughter’s amazing story, which taught this mama everything she needed to know about forgiveness: “My daughter hasn’t seen her biological father since she was four years old.”
She is now eleven years old. He contacted me when daughter was two and asked if I would allow him to terminate his parental rights so he could stop paying child support, and I agreed… I wanted to spare her the heartbreak of a revolving door father, and the financial price was well worth him never being able to fail her again. I never told her where he went or who her father was…
I’ve always responded to her queries in the most age-appropriate manner feasible. He contacted me when she was four years old and informed me that he had been diagnosed with cancer and would like to visit her.I scheduled a day for us to meet in the park. He had requested two hours. He stayed for 20 minutes and then disappeared. We ran into someone who knows him during the summer, and they commented on how similar she is to his other children. They went on to say that he had settled down and started a family.
My stomach clenched as I imagined how upsetting that must have been for my daughter. I cut the talk short and got in the car to leave when I noticed her smiling. ‘Mom… he figured out how to be a dad,’ she remarked. That’s a wonderful gesture. I’m delighted for his children.’ And on that day, an 11-year-old taught me everything I needed to know about forgiveness.”
God invites us to develop a childlike faith. That, I believe, includes childlike forgiving. The lesson we can all draw from this 11-year-old is that we must take something seemingly impossible—forgiving others—and simplify it.