Forgiveness can be a tough thing to give people sometimes.

It is often misunderstood. Forgiving someone doesn’t necessarily mean that you are okay with what they did or said to you, it can mean that you are simply choosing not to hang onto the anger and bitterness associated with the grudge.

By letting go of those negative feelings, you are ensuring that more negativity will not be produced. The longer you hang onto a grudge, the more likely you will be to seek revenge.

Someone who seeks revenge is choosing to lower themselves to the same level of the person that hurt them. If you do this, you may think that you are just “getting even” one time and can go back to that same person that you were before that person hurt you.

However, that is far from the truth.

Each time someone seeks revenge, they lose a small part of themselves. The part that feels compassion seems to slip away a little, and the part that has a desire to cause pain seems to grow a little stronger.

You may not realize it right away, but one day you will look at yourself and realize how much you have changed from all those times that you chose to hang onto the negative emotions. No one wants to look back on their life and realize that they wasted any of their short and precious time in life on bitterness.

I understand that not everyone actually earns or deserves our forgiveness, but based on the reasons I have stated, it would still be beneficial for us to forgive them anyway.

However, depending on the severity of the act, it can feel almost impossible for us to provide the service of forgiveness in some cases, but we must always remember what the alternative, revenge, can do to us. It can change us into the very “monsters” that we feel have hurt us.

The truth is, we all have these “beasts” inside of us, but we have to remember that holding grudges and seeking revenge can make these negative sides of us grow even stronger and make them even more difficult to control than they already are.
Forgiveness is an essential ingredient to a happy life, and without happiness, we have nothing.