Gut check: forgiveness

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Back in April of this year I attended Exponential Conference in Orlando, Florida. I wrote about it here and here, but for those of you who don’t know, Exponential is the largest gathering of church planters in the world. To try and absorb everything I heard at that conference would be akin to taking a sip of water from a fire hydrant going full blast. Sometimes I took notes furiously, other times I simply tried to listen and glean what I could apply to my life.

But you know, there are times when a person speaks a truth into your life that’s so powerful you feel compelled to share it. This person was Jo Saxton. She didn’t say it to me personally. She said it via jumbo-tron in a room of over 2,000 people. The words were not her own. They were words she paid forward from another speaker she heard at a leadership conference.

“The way to know you had fully forgiven someone was that you no longer felt they owed you anything.”

I don’t know about you, but for me, that statement is profound. Often the trajectories of our lives are determined less by the trials and victories therein and more how we choose to react to them. Can we ever truly forgive as we have been forgiven? With no strings attached?

If the above statement struck a chord with you, I invite you to read the article it was taken from in its entirety. It will probably take you less than 2 minutes from start to finish, but if you’re struggling to truly forgive, those two minutes may put you on a path you’ve been longing to travel: Stories of Sifted: Jo Saxton