by EMoore
Forgive and forget does not mean you must forget, sometimes this is impossible. Remembering however should not bring back anything but forgiveness and a prayer for the one who wronged you. The hurt will linger and instead of denying this, offer it toward a healing for the that caused you discomfort.
Each time something associated with the time or place of the hurt is out in the forefront of your mind, the hurt will resurface. Maybe it will diminish with time and will no longer be painful, but still, each remembrance will bring a new opportunity to help those who lost control of their emotions and harmed you.
Forgive means to stop being angry over past offenses. This anger if not controlled can make you physically ill. You must find ways of getting rid of these hard feelings. Let's be truthful, maybe it is not exactly the way you thought and you are keeping yourself away from forgiving the other person. To forgive is to pardon the offense done to you. It is saying, I refuse to torture myself in this way. It may mean you will have to confront the person and say it out loud. I forgive you, please accept it.
Encarta defines forgive in three ways: Stop being angry, excuse someone for a mistake, excuse someone for a wrong doing. The second definition is to pardon somebody and the third is cancel an obligation. A store owner, as an example, might cancel an obligations such as a debt. The Old English Word forgiefan means to abstain from giving.
We sure have changed that definition around, haven't we? Well, forgiveness may be possible and is something necessary to our good health, forgetting is sometimes nigh impossible. Lets see what word's neighborly Thesaurus has to say about other words we can substitute. Did I say forgetting is hard to do? Not when you are seventy-five years old. As soon as I typed that, I forget it was the Thesaurus I meant to consult and not the dictionary. Oh well, what does it mean to forget. Not that I seem to need it, mine seems built in.
Forget means to fail to remember something, leave something behind, neglect somebody or something, to fail to give attention to someone who needs it, stop worrying about somebody or something.
Well whatever, we cannot go through life taking offense over every little slight. Most people don't mean to offend us, they simply don't know how to please us