Not to harp too much on the subject of forgiveness; but, I think there's more nuance to it than people acknowledge and it can force people into an anti-forgiveness mindset and cause people to believe that people haven't forgiven when they actually have.
The most important experience of my life in regard to really learning how to forgive and what it really means was at the end of my longest romantic relationship. I won't get into all the details; but, there was some extracurricular fucking involved and several subsequent insults added to injury. It wasn't until about eleven months after the breakup that I decided to cut her out of my life entirely and stop trying to maintain the friendship.
At face value, it appears to people that I haven't forgiven her. Really, I've lost friends because people thought that I wouldn't forgive her.
I did forgive her. The point that I started making was simply this:
You can break my television and I can forgive you. Of course, the right thing to do is to buy me a new one; but, even if you can't afford it, I can forgive you if you make an effort to make things right and show that you're sorry. If I trust you again and you break my television again, I can still forgive you. I'm gonna be more cautious and expect you to do more than you did last time. If you break my television a third time, the fact that I'm not inviting you over anymore doesn't mean that I haven't forgiven you, it's just that I'm making a smart decision.
I decided that my heart had been carelessly broken enough times to stop trusting my ex-girlfriend with it. That doesn't mean that I haven't forgiven her. It means that I didn't want to drink myself to death before I hit the age of forty.
I'll likely and hopefully never understand the tragedies that people like the family of the victim of the Henry Ruggs collision from a personal level. I won't understand personally what the survivors of the Dylan Roof shooting went through; but, I believe them when they say that they've forgiven him. That forgiveness doesn't mean that everything has to go back to business as usual or that you have to show the same amount of trust as you would have otherwise.
