For a long time, I thought forgiveness was something you did once. Someone hurt you. You Forgave them. Done. Apparently, nobody told my feelings.
Because I could genuinely forgive someone and then wake up the next morning still hurt. Something could trigger the memory six months later and suddenly there it was again—the anger, the rejection, the questions. And then came the guilt.
I thought I forgave this. If I really forgave him, why does this still hurt? If I really let it go, why am I thinking about it again?
Maybe I hadn't forgiven him after all. Or maybe I didn't understand forgiveness. One of the deepest places I had to learn that lesson was in my marriage. My husband had an affair.
There was a time when the details of that sentence mattered tremendously to me. I needed answers. I needed timelines. I needed to understand what happened, why it happened, what was true and what wasn't. Those details once felt incredibly important to my healing.
They don't anymore. So I'm not going to give them to you. Not because I'm trying to clean up our story, but because I've learned that healing doesn't require turning someone else's worst decisions into permanent public exhibits. What matters here is what the betrayal marked in me.
I felt rejected. I questioned my worth. I questioned him. I questioned what had been real. And even after choosing to remain in my marriage and choosing to forgive him, I discovered that forgiveness didn't magically erase any of those things.
Then I watched a movie called The Shack and it forever shifted my perception. Without spoiling it, there is a scene near the end involving forgiveness that lodged itself somewhere deep inside me. What struck me was the repetition of it—the choice to forgive being expressed again and again, out loud. Something about that clicked, especially having the understanding of the power in our words that are speaking either life or death.
Maybe forgiveness wasn't something I had failed at because I needed to choose it again. Maybe choosing it again was part of forgiveness. So that's what I started doing.
I began verbally stating the fact like a broken record stuck in the groove, "I forgive him". And when it hurt again, "I forgive him". When another memory surfaced, "I forgive him". When my feelings insisted that surely a forgiven wound shouldn't still ache, "I forgive him".
Not because repeating words was some magical formula, and certainly not because what happened suddenly became okay. It wasn't okay. Forgiveness didn't change what had happened. It was beginning to change what happened inside me when I remembered it.
Years later, I've come to understand this through another lens too. The brain learns. It builds patterns, associations and responses. We repeat something enough and the pathway becomes familiar. Sometimes those patterns are helpful. Sometimes they're survival. Something happens in the present, and before we've consciously decided what it means, an old program is already running.
'This looks like that. Last time this happened, I got hurt. Protect yourself. Run. Fight. Shut down'.
And sometimes, as Christians, I think we can become so accustomed to looking for spiritual warfare around us that we forget God also tells us to look at what is happening within us. Yes, I believe there is an enemy. I also believe I have a mind that needs renewing.
Scripture told us that long before I ever learned the word neuroplasticity. Romans 12:2 tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. For years, I think I focused primarily on the word transformed.
Now I pay much more attention to renewing. Renewing implies process. Repetition. Taking an old thought and confronting it with truth, then doing it again and again until truth becomes the pathway I know how to travel.
That's why I've become fascinated by Jesus' response when Peter asked how many times he was expected to forgive someone. Peter wanted a number. Jesus gave him one so large that keeping score rather missed the point. Some translations render it seventy-seven times. Others say seventy times seven.
Either way, Jesus wasn't handing Peter a convenient forgiveness punch card.
'Only 312 more times and I'm free'! 😂
He was teaching him a way of living.
I've heard claims about the number of repetitions required to create new neural pathways, and I find the possible parallel fascinating. But I'm not going to pretend Jesus was secretly teaching a neuroscience formula that we can prove mathematically.
I don't need that claim to see the wisdom in what He said. Because I have lived the repetition. Sometimes forgiveness needs another rep.
Something else from The Shack stayed with me too: Hurting people hurt people. That phrase eventually helped me look at Nick differently. Again, understanding why someone hurts you does not make hurting you acceptable. Pain may explain behavior. It doesn't excuse it.
But over the years, as Nick became more honest about what had been happening inside him, I began to understand that his betrayal wasn't actually a verdict on my worth. There were wounds in him that existed long before that affair ever happened.
Eventually he was able to recognize a pattern in himself: when a relationship mattered enough that someone had the power to hurt him, there was a temptation to damage it first.
If I hurt you before you hurt me, maybe I get to control how this ends.
Push. Test. Sabotage.
How far can I go before you leave?
Those were his wounds to deal with. They weren't mine to fix, and they didn't absolve him of responsibility for what he'd done. But understanding that changed something in me. For a long time, betrayal had whispered: He did this because you weren't enough.
Looking backward, I can finally answer: That wasn't my truth to carry. His actions came out of things happening inside him. They affected me deeply. They marked me. But they did not define me.
Eventually, I had another truth to learn. The man standing in front of me wasn't frozen forever in the worst thing he'd ever done. Neither am I. If I truly believe that Jesus makes us new, then at some point I have to allow people room to become new. That doesn't mean abandoning wisdom. It doesn't mean pretending patterns haven't happened. And it certainly doesn't mean calling harmful behavior holy because someone says they've changed.
It means I have to be willing to look for the fruit of transformation rather than insisting that someone's worst chapter remain their permanent name. I needed that grace too.
So slowly, I began practicing another kind of repetition. When the old story said, 'This is the man who betrayed you', I learned to answer with what I could see God doing now:
'This is my husband. This is a man learning to follow Jesus. This is a man being confronted with his own wounds. This is a man walking through his own fire. This is a man I can extend the same grace I've needed extended to me.'
Not because the past didn't happen. Because it did. The page is still underneath the transparency. It just doesn't get the top layer anymore. Truth does.
Looking through the rearview mirror now, I can see something else. Nick's affair didn't introduce me to rejection. It simply knew exactly where to hit. There are older layers underneath that wound. Some of them go back much farther than my marriage. And if I'm being truthful, I'm still discovering just how deep some of them go. We'll get there. But this particular layer taught me something I desperately needed to know:
Feelings are not always verdicts. Sometimes they're arrows.
They point toward something that needs attention. Something hurts here. Something feels threatened here. Something from yesterday just got activated by today. The arrow deserves my attention. But it doesn't automatically get to tell me what is true.
That's where renewing my mind has changed everything.
I used to think forgiveness meant eventually reaching a place where I could look backward and feel nothing. Now I don't think numbness is the goal at all. The scar can still exist. The memory can still exist. The page can still exist.
Forgiveness simply means it doesn't get to keep writing the next chapter.
Sometimes I forgave once. Sometimes I forgave again. And sometimes I probably made it somewhere around rep number 489 and discovered there was still one more waiting for me. So I chose truth again. Not because what happened didn't matter, but because it doesn't get to define who either of us is anymore.
I can see him for who he is instead of only seeing what he did to me. And perhaps that's what renewing the mind has looked like for me: The memory remained. The pathway changed.
Forgiveness doesn't rewrite what happened. It renews the way we carry what happened.