Someone has wronged you and hurt you deeply. The anger, pain, and bitterness continue to haunt you. Perhaps it doesn’t bother you all the time, but a particular name, word, or even sight can bring back a rush of painful and bitter feelings that lay just underneath the surface. You find yourself angry, on edge, and suspicious. Perhaps you’re building walls to keep people away so that you can prevent yourself from being hurt even more.
From molestation as a child to betrayal in your marriage and everything in between, someone, somewhere, doing something has hurt you. How do you heal from that? How do you recover and put it behind you? People say to forgive and forget, but whoever said that must’ve never been hurt. How do you forget when someone takes your heart and smashes it all to pieces?
There is a way to heal–not forget. You’ll never forget. But healing? That is possible. It is even possible to find forgiveness. It won’t come immediately. You won’t find this method to be a magical wand. The person who hurt you won’t miraculously have a change of heart, but you can heal.
The Foolproof Method of Healing and Forgiving
The following method is not profound or difficult. It is just a simple method of prayer that will initiate the healing process and allow you to find it within yourself to forgive the one who wronged you. Here’s what you do:
Take about five to ten minutes every day and tell God exactly how you feel about the person who wronged you. God already knows your heart, so you won’t be fooling Him anyway. If you wish that so and so would break his leg, then tell God that. Tell God how angry you are. Tell Him how much you want to exact revenge–even tell Him how you would exact revenge if given the chance. Get it all out. Don’t smooth it over. Don’t try to be holy when you really aren’t. God already knows your heart (1 Samuel 16:7; Acts 1:24), so tell Him exactly what you think and what you want.
When you run out of things to say on this score, then finish your prayer with two simple sentences: “Jesus, please, help me to forgive and heal. I place so-and-so in your hands.”
That’s it. Nothing else to it. But you do it every single day without fail. If necessary, you do it multiple times during the day. In fact, at any point where you feel like you will be overwhelmed with the pain and anger, pray that prayer. Tell God exactly how you feel about the person and what you would like done to them. Then end your prayer with that pair of simple sentences: “Jesus, please, help me to forgive and heal. I place so-and-so in your hands.”
How It Works To Help You Heal From A Wrong
Here is what will happen as you continue to pray like that. At first, you will just be glad to get out all that anger and bitterness that you’ve bottled up inside you. That is actually scriptural. The Bible teaches that only by truth and mercy is iniquity purged (Proverbs 16:6). Like an infected wound, you will never heal until you purge out the infection of bitterness. You have to get it all out before you can heal. Your honesty in the way you feel is the first step toward releasing it. Until you can be honest about it, you’ll just let it fester in your heart and mind until it consumes and destroys you.
But after a while, a strange thing begins to happen. You will gradually lose your vehemence toward the one who wronged you. At first, you might be asking God to do unspeakable things to the one who hurt you, but after a time of praying that prayer over and over, you just won’t feel so vindictive. Instead of asking God to break his legs, you may ask God to just let him stub his toe–just to use a facetious example.
In time, you’ll go to pray, and you’ll just pause and realize, surprisingly, you are no longer angry about what the person did to you or bitter about it. In fact, thinking of that person doesn’t even get you upset any more. Your prayer changes at that point. Soon you will be praying that God blesses the one who wronged you (Matthew 5:44) in the spirit that Jesus desires.
At that point, you are healed. You can move beyond the wrong having forgiven the one who hurt you and no longer carrying around the pain of the wrong itself. Healing is complete when you can ask God to bless the one who hurt you and truly mean it. By following the simple method presented above, you’ll heal from a wrong quicker than you think.
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