Forgiveness

You know that you have forgiven somebody when you can trust them again.

I've struggled with this for years. I know I'm supposed to forgive people who have offended me but how can I forgive somebody who I just can't trust because I know they will offend me again the same way they did before. There are quite a few people I know or have known who fit into this irony. There's my now-deceased half-brother. There's my mother-in-law for sure. There's my covertly narcissistic wife. I've known lots of "born again" type Christians who don't deserve my trust and at least half of the world's population of Muslims, or so it seems sometimes, can't be trusted. They hate us. There's this new wave of Socialists who claim not to be Commies but are. How can a forgiving person forgive these people.

To top it off, there's the fact that "forgive" and "forgiveness" and "forgiven" and the rest of the words derived from them are all words that are basically undefined meaning their meaning depends on each individual using them.

Well in the interest of clarity - and sanity - I have decided to define forgiveness using a concept much easier to relate to, namely trust. Who can you trust. Who can't you trust. And how can you forgive somebody you can't trust. It turns out you can't. If you know that somebody is untrustworthy then you just plain haven't forgiven them and can't.

Problem solved.