The Pew and The Couch: What Forgiveness Actually Is

A grudge can feel like control, but it often turns into a daily tax on your mind, your body, and your faith. We talk about forgiveness without the polished church clichés and without asking you to pretend the hurt was small. We start by clearing up the biggest misconceptions: forgiveness is not forgetting, not excusing harm, and not the same thing as reconciliation. You can release what someone owes you internally while still keeping distance, setting boundaries, and requiring real accountability.

From there, we dig into what biblical forgiveness actually is: a decision to release a debt. We walk through key passages like Matthew 6, Matthew 18, Ephesians 4:32, and Romans 5:8, and we name how these verses get misused to rush people past pain. We also connect the spiritual side to what psychology and research say about resentment and bitterness, including the way chronic anger can show up as stress, disrupted sleep, high blood pressure, and a constant low-grade alertness that steals your presence from the people right in front of you.

We close with practical guidance you can take into real life today: name what happened with clarity, make a decision before your feelings cooperate, bring God into it with specific honest prayer, and choose again when the memory resurfaces. If the wound is deep, repeated, or tied to church hurt, we also talk about why seeking a licensed counselor, therapist, or trained pastor is wisdom, not weak faith, and we share resources including Navigating the Noise: Faith Meets Therapy and the 988 support line. If this helped you, subscribe, share it with someone carrying a heavy story, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Transcript

Welcome And A Quick Disclaimer

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This is the Pew and the Couch Podcast. I am Javier. And if you have ever sat with a hurt that would not go away, if there is someone in your life who did something that still sits in your chest when you think about them, today's episode is for you. We are talking about forgiveness. Not the cleaned up Sunday morning version, the real thing. What the Bible actually says, what holding a wound too long does to your mind and body, and what it looks like to begin moving through it in real life. Before we start, I want to be up front. I am not a licensed therapist or psychiatrist, and nothing in this episode is medical advice. If you are in a place where you need that kind of support right now, please reach out. You can dial 988 for free and confidential help. Before we go anywhere with this topic, we need to clear some things up. Because a lot of the damage that gets done in the name of forgiveness comes directly from people misunderstanding what it actually is. And if you are working from a wrong definition, you are going to keep trying to do something that does not actually exist and wondering why it never works. So let us be real about what it is not. First, it is not forgetting. You have probably heard forgive and forget your whole life said so many times it sounds like one word. But your brain does not work that way, and honestly, God never actually asked it to. When he says in Jeremiah 31, 34 that he will remember our sins no more, that is a statement about his own divine nature, not a command for you to erase your memory on command. The fact that you

What Forgiveness Is Not

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still remember what happened clearly does not mean you have failed to do the work. It means you are human. Second, it is not saying what happened was okay. This one causes real damage, especially inside church communities. When someone gets told to forgive and what they hear is, declare what happened acceptable. They either perform a version of it they have not actually made, or they shut down entirely and walk away from the whole thing. Neither one of those is healing. What happened to you happened. It was wrong. Whatever working through this looks like for you, it does not require you to pretend otherwise. Third, it is not the same thing as reconciliation. These are two completely different things, and mixing them up keeps people stuck. Think about it this way. Say a close friend told your secret to people in your circle who had no business knowing it. Your whole circle found out, things got uncomfortable, the friendship took a serious hit. You can decide in your own heart to stop holding what they owe you, to release the anger you have been carrying over what they did, you can stop rehearsing the conversation, you can stop keeping score, and you can also decide that the friendship cannot go back to where it was without a real honest conversation and some demonstrated change over time. Both of those things can be true at the same time. One does not cancel the other. Letting go of what they owe you internally does not mean you hand that person the same level of trust they had before all of this. That would not be grace. That would just be ignoring the very real information you now carry about who that person showed themselves to be forth. It is not weakness. Holding a grudge can feel like power, like you are making sure they do not just walk away from what they did, but stop and think about who is actually carrying the weight in that situation. They may have moved on completely. They may genuinely not think about it at all anymore. Meanwhile, you are still standing at the door of what happened, keeping watch, paying a daily toll on something that is not even yours to carry anymore. Choosing to step away from that door and put that energy somewhere else takes more courage than holding the position. Fifth, it is not a feeling you wait for. A lot of people get stuck here for years. They are waiting to feel ready, waiting until the anger settles enough that the choice to release it finally feels natural and right. But that is usually not how this actually moves for people. The decision comes before the feeling, not after. You make the choice while you are still angry, still hurt, still playing it back in your head, and the emotional shift tends to follow over time. Some days the feeling cooperates with the choice, some days it pushes back hard. The choice stands regardless sixth. It is not always a one-time event. For wounds that ran deep or happened more than once, this is almost always a process, not a moment. You decide. Then the memory surfaces three weeks later and you decide again. Then something triggers it and you decide again. That is not failing at it. That is what real healing actually looks like for most people. Real healing for most people does not move in a straight line and seventh. It is not something you are supposed to do entirely alone. The church sometimes treats this like a purely private spiritual transaction between you, God, and the person who hurt you. But there is real value in having someone trained walk alongside you through it. A pastor, a counselor, a therapist. Someone who can sit with the complexity of what you are carrying without flinching and without rushing you toward a resolution you are not ready for. Asking for that kind of help is not weakness and it is not a lack of faith. It is wisdom. Here is why all of this actually matters. Most people who struggle to move through this are not struggling because something is spiritually wrong with them or because they do not love God enough. They are struggling because they have been trying to do something they were never given a clear, honest picture of. They have been performing a version of it that got handed to them somewhere along the way. Smile and move on. Do not let it show, declare it done, and keep it moving. And when that does not work, when the weight is still sitting right there, six months later, six years later, they assume something must be wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with you. You just may have been working from a definition that was never going to get you to where you actually needed to go. Now that we have all of that on the table, we can actually start talking about what this thing really is. So what is it? At its simplest, this is a decision to release someone from a debt they owe you. That sounds clean when you say it out loud. That is it. When someone wrongs you, they incur something real. And what we are really talking about is the moment or the ongoing series of moments where you make the choice to stop requiring payment on that debt. Not because they paid it, not because they deserve to walk free, but because holding on to it is costing you more than letting it go ever could. Now that definition does not come from a self-help book, which comes from the character of God as we see it throughout Scripture. So let us go there. In Matthew 6,

Forgiveness As Releasing A Debt

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14 and 15, right after Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord's Prayer, he says, For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. That passage has probably been used against hurting people more than almost any other verse in the Bible. Used to rush people past pain that had not been given any room to breathe, used to make someone feel like a bad Christian because they are still carrying what was done to them. That is not what Jesus is doing here. What he is pointing to is a spiritual reality. The person who has genuinely received grace from God, the full unearned kind, cannot then walk around indefinitely with a closed fist toward another person. Those two postures do not fit together. When they are disconnected, something is off. Not in God's willingness toward us, in our understanding of what we have already been given. Then Jesus tells a story in Matthew 18 that puts the point in vivid terms. A man owes a king an amount of money that could not be repaid in several lifetimes. The king cancels it completely. The man walks out free and clear. Then he finds someone who owes him a much smaller amount, grabs him by the throat, and demands payment. The king hears about it and is furious. Not because the smaller debt was not real, but because the man who had just experienced total cancellation walked right back out and behaved as if none of it had happened. Jesus is not telling that story to shame you for struggling. He is showing you something about how the human heart works. When we forget the magnitude of what has already been done for us, we lose something. We lose the capacity to extend any portion of that same grace to the people who wrong us. What we are being invited into is not a moral exercise. It is a response to something we have already received. Ephesians 4.32 lands it plainly. Paul writes, Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other just as in Christ God forgave you. Those two words just set the standard, not your emotional readiness, not whether the other person deserves it. The standard is how God handled you. And Romans 5.8 tells us exactly how that went. God showed his love while we were still in the wrong. The grace did not wait for the apology. It always came first. Now I want to be careful here because this is a place where the text gets misused. The biblical call to release what someone owes you is not a call to have no backbone. The same Paul who wrote Ephesians 4.32 also wrote about confronting wrongdoing directly. Jesus, in Matthew 18.15, actually gives specific guidance for going to someone who has sinned against you and addressing it face to face. Releasing what they owe you and holding people accountable are not opposites in Scripture. Both can be true at the same time. Say someone in your small group took something personal you shared in confidence and spread it around. It got around. You were hurt. You can do the internal work of releasing the resentment and at the same time have a direct conversation with that person about what happened and why it was not okay. One does not cancel the other. In fact, doing both is often what any real repair actually requires. There is one more thread I want to pull on here because it reframes everything. Scripture does not primarily frame this process as a moral obligation, it frames it as freedom. In Luke 4, Jesus says he was anointed to proclaim freedom for the prisoners. That language reaches further than any one application, but the picture it paints is worth sitting with. Holding someone's debt keeps you bound to the transaction. Releasing it is a move toward freedom. God's invitation into this is not just about the person who hurt you, it is about getting you out. Psalm 103.12 says that as far as the East is from the West, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. That is actually the God we are dealing with. Not one who holds things over our heads, not one who brings up the past at the worst possible moment. His handling of our debt against him is complete, and he does not leave us to figure out how to extend that same thing to others on our own. The spirit that lives in a believer produces patience and love as fruit over time. What you cannot generate from your own willpower, he can grow in you. I want to end this section by being honest about something. The gap between where you are and what Scripture is asking can feel enormous. Maybe it feels that way right now. That gap is not a sign that you are failing at this. It is just the honest starting point. And an honest starting point is always a better place to begin from than pretending you are somewhere you are not yet. Part of getting to that honest starting point is taking a real look at what carrying this is already doing to you. Not as a guilt trip. Just so you can see the full picture clearly, because most people who stay stuck here are not stuck because they enjoy the weight of it. They stay there because nobody ever gave them a clear and honest picture of what that weight costs over time. And it costs something real. Every single day, here is what it tends to look like. Say you had a falling out with a family member years ago, it was bad, the situation never got fully resolved. You both moved on, more or less, or at least it looked that way from the outside. You see each other at holidays, you are civil, you make it work when you have to, but there is a wall

What Unforgiveness Does To You

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there and everyone in the family knows it. And every time their name comes up on your phone, your body reacts before your mind does. You are carrying something that is running in the background of your life constantly, even on the days you are not actively thinking about it at all. That is the emotional dimension. The wound sits just below the surface and it gets activated by things that remind you of what happened. A phrase someone uses at work that sounds too familiar, a situation that echoes something, a song, and every time that wire gets touched, you re-experience some portion of the original hurt all over again. You are not just carrying a memory, you are carrying a live wire. Over time, if none of that gets processed in a healthy way, something starts to shift. The anger does not stay pointed at the specific person or the specific thing that happened. It spreads, it becomes a posture, a way of moving through the world, and the person who has carried it long enough starts to see everything through it. They become slower to trust, quicker to assume the worst. They're guarded in situations where they do not need to be. Hebrews 12.15 describes it as a root that grows up and defiles many. That word root is important. A root is underground, you do not see it working, but it grows, and eventually it affects everything above the surface. The relationships, the faith, the peace, all of it, there is a significant relational cost too. When a wound goes unprocessed long enough, the wall you put up to protect yourself from one person starts to become a general policy. You become less available, harder to reach. Not because you sat down one day and decided to become that way, but because the protection instinct eventually just started running on its own. And slowly, without you even fully noticing it happening, the capacity for real closeness starts to narrow. Not just with the person who hurt you, with people in general. Spiritually, something similar tends to happen. Jesus in Matthew 5 says, if you are at the altar and you remember that your brother has something against you, go and be reconciled first. The implication is clear. Unresolved relational weight creates interference in your spiritual life. It does not mean God steps back from you, but the human heart has a genuinely hard time being fully open in two directions at the same time. The interference is real. And then there is the physical dimension, which often surprises people. Carrying chronic resentment is expensive for the body. Research has linked it consistently to elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, higher blood pressure, and a weakened immune response. The body keeps a record of what the mind holds. Think about someone you know who has been bitter for years. Pay attention to how it sits in them. It is not just emotional. You can often see it in how they hold themselves, how they enter a room, how quickly they go to the worst interpretation of a situation. That is not just a personality trait they were born with. That is the physical expression of something that has been carried far too long. Dr. John Townsend, a Christian psychologist, has written that what bitterness ultimately does is prevent people from being able to move forward. It is not loud or dramatic. It is quiet. It just steadily redirects the energy that should be going toward your actual present life, toward managing something that already happened in the past. And that is worth sitting with. Every day you carry this, energy goes into it. To actively trying not to think about it, into thinking about it too much anyway, into the low hum of something unresolved. That energy is not going toward the people who are actually in front of you right now. It is not going toward your work, your kids, your marriage, your creativity, your sense of purpose. You are paying a daily fee on something that already happened. And the person you have been paying it to may not even know the meter is still running on their end. None of this is meant to make you feel ashamed. If you are carrying something real, you have a reason. A hurt was real. What was done to you was real, you are not wrong for feeling it. But grief and bitterness are different things. Grief moves through you, bitterness moves in, and when what should have been grief stops moving and starts to settle in, that is when it begins to cost you in ways that quietly compound over time. If any of what we just covered lands somewhere in your chest right now, that is not a sign something is wrong with you. That is just honest information. It is your body and your history both pointing you towards something that still needs real attention. That question is what the rest of this episode is going to be about. So let us talk about what happens on the other side of all of this. Because the conversation about what it costs to hold on is only half the picture. The other half is what becomes available to you when you start to let go. And I want to be honest with you up front, the other side does not always look the way people expect it to. It is not always a dramatic moment of tearful release. For some people it is, but for a lot of people it is quieter than that. It is more like the absence of something that was always there. You notice at some point that the name does not land in your chest the same way it used to, that the memory can surface without pulling you all the way back into the middle of it, that you can think about it without it taking over the rest of your afternoon. That

What Changes When You Let Go

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shift matters more than it might sound right now. Emotionally, the most consistent thing people report after doing this work is a reduction in the grip of chronic anger. Not that the memory disappears completely, not that what happens stops mattering, but the emotional charge around it begins to lessen. There is space where there used to be heat, and that space starts to become available for everything else. The relationships in front of you, the work that needs your attention, the conversations you have been half present for because part of you was always somewhere else. Think about what it costs in terms of presence. Say you are at dinner with your family and someone says something that touches the old wound without even knowing it, and suddenly you are not fully at dinner anymore. Part of you has gone back to the moment where the thing happened. Your body is still at the table, but your attention has gone somewhere else entirely. The people sitting right in front of you do not have all of you. They never do as long as something unresolved is still running in the background of your life. Releasing that weight is not just about the past. It is about being able to actually show up in the present. There is also something that happens to how people see themselves after they work through this. Many people who carry a deep wound long enough start to organize their entire identity around it. They become, in their own mind and in how they present themselves, the person this happened to. And while that experience is completely real and should never be minimized, allowing it to become your primary identity is its own quiet kind of loss. When people genuinely move through this process, something else tends to happen. There is a gradual shift from being the person this happened to toward being the person who survived it and chose something different on the other side. That shift is significant and it is not overnight, but it does change the story you carry about yourself. Researchers who study this specifically have found consistent patterns. People who genuinely work through this report lower rates of anxiety and depression over time, greater sense of personal well-being, measurably more capacity for empathy, stronger and more honest relationships, these are not small things. They are the actual texture of a functioning present life. And they show up consistently in people who make the genuine choice to release what they have been holding on to. Dr. Carl Rogers, a foundational figure in psychology, wrote that releasing long-held resentment creates space for healing and growth. That word space keeps showing up in the research and in the personal accounts. This process does not fill something in, it clears something out. And when the space opens up, things that were being crowded out by the weight start to come back. Energy comes back, creativity comes back, the ability to be present with people you love comes back. Spiritually, the effects tend to run even deeper. People describe a kind of clearing in their relationship with God after they do this work. Not because God was withholding himself before, but because they were less available. The static clears, prayer starts to feel less like talking through a wall, worship opens up in ways it had not before. The things of God that had felt distant start to feel more accessible again. Proverbs 19.11 says that wisdom yields patience, and it is to one's glory to overlook an offense. That word glory is not what we usually associate with letting something go, but it points to something real. There is a dignity that comes to the person who chooses this, not because they denied what happened, not because they were naive or got walked on, but because they understood the value of their own peace and chose it over holding a debt that had been costing them everything for far too long. And physically, the body tends to respond to this kind of release as well. Research has linked it to lower blood pressure, better sleep, and improved immune function over time. The same way the body stores what the mind holds, it also reflects when that weight lifts. People who have done this work consistently describe feeling lighter, not as a metaphor, actually lighter in a real and physical sense. None of this means the process is easy. The fact that something good is on the other side does not make the road to get there simple. But knowing what is on the other side matters. Because when you are in the middle of the hardest part of this, when the choice feels impossible and the feeling is nowhere near ready, it helps to know what you are actually moving toward. You are not moving toward pretending, you are not moving toward enabling, you are not moving toward forgetting what happened, you are moving toward being genuinely free from it, and that is worth a great deal. So how do you actually get there? How do you move from knowing all of this to actually doing something with it? That is the question that matters now. Not the theology, not the research, but the real practical question of what do you do with this when you go home today? I want to walk through some things that actually move the needle, not a formula, not a clean five-step process that wraps it all up. Just some honest practical guidance on what this tends to look like when it is actually happening in real life. The first thing, and I cannot overstate how important this one is, is to name what happened, specifically, out loud or on paper, to yourself or to God or to someone you trust, not a general sense of being hurt or wronged, the actual specific thing. This person did this, it happened on this occasion. It affected me in these ways. This is the part most people skip entirely, especially in faith communities where the pressure

Practical Steps To Start Forgiving

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is to move quickly toward resolution. But you cannot release something you have not actually held. The naming is the beginning. It is not dwelling, it is acknowledging the reality of what you are being asked to walk through. Say you had a mentor who took your work, presented it as their own, and got recognized for it while you got nothing. And you never said anything. You just absorbed it and moved on because the power dynamic made it feel impossible to address. Naming it means saying, out loud to yourself or to God, that person did something wrong. It cost me something real. I am angry about it, and I am carrying that anger. That naming is not weakness. It is not reopening something that should stay closed. It is honesty, and honesty is the only real starting place for any of this. The second thing is to make an actual decision. Dr. Brene Brown, who has spent years researching vulnerability and human connection, describes this process as inherently active. A deliberate choice to release what you have been holding and move in a different direction. Not a feeling, a decision. You say, in the place in you where decisions actually get made, I am choosing to stop requiring payment on this debt. I am releasing what this person owes me. Not because they deserve it or because what they did was acceptable, but because I am done letting this cost me what it has been costing me. That decision may not feel real the first time you make it. Make it anyway, write it down if you need to. Some people find it helpful to do something physical to mark the moment. Write out what they are releasing and then destroy the paper. The ritual itself is not the point, but it helps the mind and the body register that something has genuinely changed. The third thing is to bring God into it specifically. Not as a last resort, not after you have exhausted your own effort, right from the beginning. Because if the standard for this is how God handled us in Christ, and it is, then trying to get there on your own emotional resources is going to run out fast. Pray with specifics. Not just help me do this, but God, I am still angry, I do not want to release this. Give me the willingness to want to. Start there, that is an honest prayer, and God can work with honesty in ways he cannot always work with performance. The fourth thing is to deal with what comes up after you make the decision. Because it will come up, the memory will surface again, something will trigger the old feeling. When that happens, you do not have to go back and re examine whether you really meant it when you made the decision. You just bring the choice back to the table and make it again. I already decided this. I choose it again right now. Over time, the distance between those moments tends to grow, the intensity tends to lessen. Not because the event changed or the person changed. But because you have been consistently choosing something different in response to it. A few things worth being clear about as you walk through this: this process does not require you to tell the person you have done it. Sometimes that conversation is healing and necessary. Sometimes it reopens wounds or hands someone information they are not safe to have. Whether or not to have that conversation is a completely separate decision from the internal one. One does not depend on the other. This also does not require you to trust that person again. Trust is built over time through demonstrated change. Releasing what someone owes you is an internal act. It does not automatically grant access. You can close the internal debt and still maintain real healthy distance from that person in your life. Those are not contradictions. And this does not mean you become naive. You are allowed to learn from what happened. You are allowed to set boundaries that reflect what you now know. Releasing someone from the debt does not erase the information you gained about who they are and how they operate. Wisdom and grace can exist in the same person at the same time. What this does require is something simpler than people expect. Not perfection, not emotional readiness, not a complete resolution of every feeling before you begin. Just willingness, a real honest willingness to move. God can work with that. And that willingness, even when it is small, even when it is mixed with still being hurt and still being angry, is enough of a starting place for something to actually begin to move. You do not have to have any of this fully figured out before you start. You just have to be genuinely willing to take the first step and start. But what if you are willing and you have tried and the weight is still not moving? That is a real place to be. It is more common than people admit. And it deserves a real answer. Sometimes the wound runs deeper than what a personal decision and a prayer can fully reach by themselves. Sometimes what happened was complex enough or repeated often enough or tangled up enough in other layers of your history that you need someone specifically trained to walk alongside you through it. And if that is where you are right now, the most important thing I can say is this getting that kind of help is not a failure of faith. It is one of the wisest things you can do. Proverbs 15.22 says, plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors they succeed. That principle did not expire when we crossed into the New Testament. God has placed gifted and trained people in the world, people who have spent years learning how to help

When You Need Trained Support

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others navigate exactly this kind of terrain. Seeking their help is not a sign that prayer is not enough or that God has not been working. It is a sign that you understand something about how God tends to work. Think about it this way. If you broke your leg, no one who loves you would tell you to just pray and skip the doctor. The fact that God is the ultimate healer does not make medical care irrelevant. He works through the process of it. The same logic applies to deep emotional and psychological wounds. A trained counselor or therapist is not a replacement for faith or a competitor with it. They are one of the means God uses to help people heal from things that require more than personal willpower to move through. Dr. Aaron Beck, one of the most influential figures in modern psychotherapy, has written that the therapeutic process can help people navigate the complexity of releasing deep offenses by providing support and guidance that is hard to access alone. What that looks like in practice is having a space completely outside of your regular relationships where you can bring the full weight of what you are carrying without having to manage anyone else's reaction to it. You do not have to be careful with a good therapist. You do not have to shrink what happened to protect their feelings. You can say the full unedited truth about what was done to you and how it has affected your life, and they are trained to sit with that without flinching and without rushing you toward resolution. That kind of space is genuinely valuable and harder to find than it should be. And for people who have been carrying something in silence for a long time, having another person in the room with it, someone trained to receive it, can begin to change things in ways they did not anticipate. For people who are working through wounds specifically connected to faith, wounds from church communities, from religious leaders, or from people who use scripture as a weapon against you, finding a therapist who understands both the mental health and the faith dimension is especially worth the effort. Not every therapist has that context, but those who do can help you separate the wound from the God who did not cause it. And that particular work, separating the experience of being hurt by people in the church from your relationship with God Himself, can be some of the most important healing work a person undertakes. There is also something specific that happens when you finally say something out loud to another person that you have been carrying in silence for years. The wound has been living in complete isolation, and isolation compounds pain in ways that are hard to track from the inside. When you name what happened in the presence of a safe trained person and they receive it without minimizing it or moving quickly past it, something starts to loosen, not because the telling itself fixed it, but because the silence that had been keeping it sealed has finally been broken. Light gets into it, and light changes things. If you are in a place right now where the thought of working through this on your own feels genuinely impossible, I want you to take that seriously as information. It is not evidence that something is wrong with you. It may simply be pointing you toward the kind of support that this particular wound actually requires. I want to mention something specific here before we close out this section. This episode is a companion to a book called Navigating the Noise, Faith Meets Therapy, available through Iron Quill Publishing at the Compass Collective.nice. That book goes much deeper into the intersection of faith and emotional health than we have time to cover in a single episode like this one. If something in today's conversation stirred something in you and you want to go further, that is a solid and practical next step. But even before any book, if you are carrying something heavy right now, please consider reaching out for real professional support. A licensed counselor, a therapist, pastor who has been trained in pastoral care, someone who is equipped to walk with you through what you are carrying at a depth that a podcast episode simply cannot provide. You do not have to perform your healing. You do not have to have the right words or the right posture when you walk in. You can show up exactly as you are, with the full weight of what you have been holding, and there are people who have been trained specifically for exactly that kind of work. Seeking counsel when you need it is not a last resort. It is wisdom. And wisdom, as Proverbs keeps reminding us throughout, tends to be exactly the thing that gets people somewhere they genuinely could not reach alone. I want to sit with something for just a minute before we close. None of what we covered today was hypothetical or distant from real life. The weight of carrying this is real, the work of releasing it is real, and the freedom on the other side is genuinely available. But I also want to be honest about something that needs to be said more directly before we close. This is hard, not just difficult in a passing way. Hard in a way that asks something genuinely significant from a person. And the reason this costs what it costs is not because God is being unreasonable with you, it is because the wound underneath it usually runs as deep as the decision you are being asked to make about it. So, if you have been sitting with this today and there is a specific person in the back of your mind, someone you have been circling around this entire conversation, and the distance between what we have been discussing and actually doing it with that person feels

Hard Situations And Closing Hope

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enormous. I want to name that. I do not want to breeze past it like it is not there. Maybe the person you have in mind has never once acknowledged what they did to you, never apologized, and if you brought it up tomorrow, they would probably deny the whole thing, or find a way to make it about something you did. You are being asked to release someone like that from what they owe you. And that deserves to be called the hard and genuinely costly thing it actually is, or maybe distance is not even an option for you. Maybe it is a family member who shows up at every single gathering, or a coworker you cannot avoid. Someone whose presence in your life is not something you can simply restructure. Doing this internal work while still having to show up in the same space as that person regularly is a different and considerably more complicated challenge than releasing someone you have not seen in years. Or maybe the situation was serious enough and deep enough that the idea of ever getting to the other side of it feels genuinely impossible from where you are standing right now. You have sat through sermons on this topic more times than you can count, and you are still stuck in the same place. And a part of you wonders seriously if you ever will. If that is where you are right now, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not spiritually behind everyone else. God is not standing somewhere ahead of you, disappointed that you have not caught up yet. Some wounds are layered in ways that take real time, real support, and more than one genuine attempt to move through. The timeline is not the same for everyone, and nobody outside of you and God gets to determine what yours looks like. He is not standing at the finish line with his arms crossed. He is with you right where you are right now, even if right now is still in the thick of it. Psalm 34.18 says the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. That is a specific kind of promise about a specific kind of moment. It is not written for people who have already worked through everything cleanly. It is written for people who are still in the middle of something that hurts. And the closeness is promised right there in that place before it is resolved, before it is finished. Here is what I want you to carry out of today. Progress in this kind of work rarely feels like progress while it is happening. The anger comes back sometimes and it is just as strong as it ever was. A memory surfaces and pulls you somewhere you thought you had already moved past. That does not mean nothing has moved. That is just what real healing tends to look like when it is happening inside an actual human life. It moves in circles that slowly widen over time, not in a straight clean line toward a tidy ending. What matters is the direction you are pointed, not how far along you are. Choosing to keep bringing this back to God, showing up to the work when the work feels slow, deciding again on the days the feeling is gone, all of that is something. All of that counts. That is not failing at this. That is faithfulness in one of its least glamorous but most real forms, one last thing before we land. The goal here is not to become someone who feels nothing when they think about what happened. It is not to get to a place where the wound no longer existed or no longer mattered. The goal is that you stop being owned by it, that your present life stops being quietly run by something that happened a long time ago, that the parts of you that quietly closed off start to come back open, that kind of freedom tends to arrive without any fanfare at all. You just notice at some point that the name does not hit the same way, that you can think about what happened without losing the rest of your day to it, that something shifted slowly and without ceremony, and you have more of yourself back than you did before. That is what this process is actually moving toward. A life that belongs to you again. If you are in this right now, even if you are only at the very beginning of being willing to try, keep going. Get whatever support you need. Be honest with God about where you actually stand. Give yourself some of the very same grace you are being asked to extend to someone else. The God who is asking this of you already knows exactly what it costs. He went first. Whatever you are carrying today, you are not carrying it by yourself. That is worth saying out loud before we go. If today stirred something in you and you want to go deeper, pick up navigating the noise. Faith Meets Therapy. It is available at the Compass Collective.nyc and it goes into the intersection of faith and mental health in ways this episode only scratched the surface of. And if you are in a place right now where you need to talk to someone, please do not wait. Dial 988 for free and confidential support. Take care of yourself this week. I am Javier, this is the Pew in the Couch Podcast, and I will talk to you next time.