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You can't forgive an organization so don't try. Let yourself name the person who hurt you and work to forgive that person.
Supplemental Content:
The response to this series was very encouraging. It was amazing to see people in the community and online interact with the material and share stories of struggle and forgiveness in their lives. Out of those stories a number of questions emerged and so we've decided to put together some additional content to address ideas that weren't touched on fully in the series.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
One of the things that a lot of people have asked during this series, came up in a number of questions and in conversations, is this. How do I forgive the church? Or maybe this. How do I forgive the company that I used to work for? How do I forgive this organization that hurt me or offended me in some way?
Speaker 1:And that is incredibly important. A very valid question to ask because I recognize, especially in a church like Commons, a lot of people are coming from that kind of place. You're re engaging with church again for the first time in a long time because of perhaps old past hurts. However, I think what needs to happen before we can move forward in a healthy way with a question like this is to reframe our language. I know it's very easy for us to say things like we were hurt by the church or I was hurt by the company that I used to work for, but that's not actually true.
Speaker 1:Because as human beings we don't relate human being to organization. We relate human being to human being. And so actually what it was is a person who hurt you. Maybe a boss who treated you unkindly. Maybe a coworker or an organizational structure that you were a part of where people picked on you or didn't treat you with dignity.
Speaker 1:Perhaps, and this one cuts the most deep, a religious leader who claimed to speak on behalf of Christ's body, the community, or on behalf of God himself and didn't treat your story with the dignity that it deserved. They were harsh with you in some way and they hurt you. What's important in forgiveness is all the things that we talked about in this series. About really naming and remembering and processing our hurts so that we can set them down and we can move forward and not be determined by those old wounds anymore. But to do that you need to be honest with yourself.
Speaker 1:That it wasn't the church who hurt you. It was a particular person. And so part of moving past that is actually going back and thinking through and remembering what happened and naming that person and saying this person hurt me and this is how they hurt me and this is why it cut me so deeply. Because that's the only way that you can actually begin to say, okay, now I know what that pain was. I can name it.
Speaker 1:I can set it down. I can choose to walk away from it. And that's the only way that you can look back on that person and begin, as we talked about in the last week of this series, to actually hope the best for them, wish the best for them, pray for them. Even if you have new boundaries in your life, but you can actually drop that anger or that bitterness towards them. You actually have to name it.
Speaker 1:And so if you have been carrying around this hurt from a corporation where you were fired perhaps, You need to know that it wasn't the company. It was that boss. If you've been carrying on this hurt from the church because they didn't treat you fairly. You need to realize that it wasn't the church. It was a particular human being or a group of people who injured you.
Speaker 1:And once you begin to name that, to process that, then you can choose to set it down and move forward. So that's what I would say is think through those things. Be honest with yourself. Allow yourself to name it. That's not bitter.
Speaker 1:It's not negative. It's just being honest with about how you were hurt and what it is that you're choosing to forgive.