One dog yelps, and the other dog keeps pushing the envelope. As the noise rises, the first dog backs away, looks at something else. In a matter of minutes, the two dogs are running around and playing with each other, tails high, eyes and ears alert, having fun with each other.
Just like these dogs, we have all had times when a friend or a relative has hurt us. We have all had times when a friend or a relative doesn’t seem to see that they have hurt us. But can we, do we, turn off the anger, forgiving the friend, when this happens to us?
For the dogs, forgiveness is a way of living. One dog in the household steps on a foot, grabs something that is not theirs, but when they do this, forgiveness is not far behind. Just as small children quickly get over what appeared to be a huge fight, so too the dogs let go and forgive.
You see, for the small children and for the dogs, forgiveness is not a matter of one insisting that the other has to be in the wrong. Forgiveness is simply the way life is.
We have no way of knowing, when a person says something that makes us feel that they are wrong, whether they are really wrong or not. Or if something they said that hurt us was really meant to hurt us. And even if it were meant to hurt us, does it make sense to go to all out war with the other person and cut them out of your life?
Dogs and children can teach us a lot about forgiveness. Watching them, we see that forgiveness is not about getting another to apologize or make up to us. Forgiveness is about letting go of the anger we feel for a particular person at a particular time. But if, like the children and the dogs, we just let go of the negatives, they won’t come back to haunt us over and over. They won’t harm the relationship.
Often times a friend or relative may say or do something that really annoys us. And what’s even worse, they don’t seem to know that they have hurt us. But whether or not they know they have hurt us, we need to forgive them. Forgiving is not about accepting what someone else did or said. It is about letting go of the anger we feel for the other. Until we let go of the anger, we will have difficulty moving into the future.
The hardest step of forgiveness is that we cannot know what the other person was thinking. In other words, we do not know their perspective. Usually the person wasn’t being mean or malicious or purposely nasty. Just as we unknowingly may have done things that hurt people in the past, and just as we have wanted forgiveness from others when we did something that offended or hurt, so too, we should be willing and able to forgive people who have hurt or offended us, regardless of whether they meant it or not. The dog does not ask the other dog if they meant it or not. The dog doesn’t hold a grudge. The dog moves on into the fullness of life..
Although it is never too late to make peace, sometimes it may take time to reconcile with another person because they may have lost some of their trust in us. In that case, we have to rebuild trust, and we cannot do that simply by saying “I forgive you” or “I am sorry.” Anyone can say they were wrong and ask for forgiveness. However, after a hurtful incident, we have to earn trust all over again.
Even if it takes a long time tp rebuild this trust, we need to remember that we should always be working on building healthy relationships. In order to do this, we have to be willing to understand that other people may do things that hurt us or get on our nerves without ever meaning to hurt us. The more we learn to let go, the less likely we will be to overreact or turn little incidents into major ones.
We also need to continually remind ourselves that having mutually respectful relationships is important in all areas of our lives It may take a lot of patience, love and commitment on our part to have such a relationship with some people, but if these people are, or ever have been, important to us, it's definitely worth the effort to build a good relationship..
Just watch the dogs and children at play. Be like the five year old child who was told by another child: “I don’t like you.” The child on the receiving end looked at the other child, and said. “That’s OK. I like you and you can still play in my sand.”
