Forgiving your spouse

[These short essays (1) ~ (3) are written by Mrs. Yoon Sun Lee, who is serving in YouVersion Korea, based on the articles on my personal Naver blog]

Forgiving your spouse (1)

"Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32).

         ‘I cannot forgive her.  Although I know in my head that I have to forgive my spouse for wrongdoing, but I cannot forgive her in my heart.  And frankly, I don’t want to forgive her.  Especially when I think about what she did to me, I get so angry that I sometimes even want to pay her back.  But I suppress.  Since the Bible says “Love is patient” (1 Cor. 13:4), I am trying to be patient again and again.  But she is hurting me again and again.  And yet she isn’t asking me for forgiveness.  I think she doesn’t even feel that she needs to ask me for forgiveness.  Maybe she doesn’t even know that she wronged me and hurt my heart.  Maybe that’s why she just acts as if nothing happened.

I hate her when she does it and I cannot bear it.  So I don’t want to forgive.’

                When we, the couple, live together, they wrong each other so many times.  Actually, we are bound to wrong each other.  The reason is because we are two different people with different personality, different background, different influence from the parents and so on.  So the conflicts, wronging and hurting each other are inevitable.  But the fundamental cause is that two sinners met and got married into one family.  Think about it.  How can’t two sinners who formed the family and commit wrongs to each other?  Not only they wrong each other, we commit sins against God and against each other.  The problem, however, is that we don’t forgive each other after we have committed so many wrongs and sins to each other.  Even if we forgive each other, we don’t do as much as we wrong and sin against each other.  We are slow to forgive and refuse to forgive each other.  Because we don’t live a life of forgiving each other, our hearts have scars and bitterness.  And these wounds and bitterness make us unable to love our spouse completely.