Greetings everyone 🙌
I mastered the act of forgiveness very late unlike others that were privileged to adopt this trait at a very early age. It was when I gave in to attending church during my youth stage. Then, I was privileged to minister to people in a crowd, and some of those topics were about forgiveness. Imagine preaching to people what you don't practice. That's one of my biggest fears in life—not to come across a situation where I'll be told to preach to people what I don't practice. I'm not saying being asked to preach what I don't practice is bad; no, I will find it hard to align with my conscience. As it is now, it would be very hard for me to preach to people to stop playing secular music. I hope you get that now?
So that's it. With those preachings, I restructured my heart to forgive easily. Not just the preachings alone, I found out that my heart is very soft and any slight thing disturbs it, and I wouldn't want a situation like that. So I go all out, making sure that my heart is not weighed down with any heaviness.
Although I forgive easily just to set my heart free, this doesn't mean that I don't find it hard to let go of some of those hurts. I've had a lot of situations where I found it so hard to forgive because of the depth of the hurt.
There was a time when a friend and I decided to do an online business together... it was somewhat Ponzi.
I owned a group chat in which 90% of them invested in the platform due to the trust they had in me. In a very short run, my friend disappeared with all the money, including my own investment. All the people in my group dragged me everywhere with tags like 'scammer,' 'thief,' and others.
I was so pained; the issue affected me mentally because it was so hard trying to explain myself to my people, none of whom believed me. The worst part was that even the friends who knew me not to do that kind of thing also followed to call me names.
I was able to survive the heat, and after about a month, the guy appeared back and began to beg for forgiveness. Can you imagine that???
I tried to forgive him at a stretch, but no, the hurt was so deep. The worst thing is that I had dissolved the WhatsApp group already, so there was no way he could announce publicly to them that I had no hand in what he did.
The deed had been done already; I just let him out of my mind and deleted his number. Yes, I forgave him and blocked ways of him reaching out to me because affliction cannot arise the second time.
All through the few years I've lived on this earth, that was the only situation I found it so hard to forgive so easily. Ever since then, I tread with caution with friends because I don't want to see myself and any friend in such a situation.
Thank you for reading.
This is my entry to Hiveghana prompt of the week
