The Following Is From The Introduction To The Book,

The Art of Forgiveness: When You Need To Forgive And Don’t Know How.  
By Lewis B. Smedes.

One of Gods Better jokes on us was to give us the power to remember the past and leave us no power to undo it.  We have all sometimes been willing to do almost anything for a magic sponge to wipe just a few moments off the tables of time.  But whatever the mind can make of the future, it cannot silence a syllable of the past.  There is no delete key for reality.  And it comforts us little to know that not even God can undo what has been done. 

It would give us some comfort if we could only forget a past that we cannot change.  But the ability to remember becomes an inability to forget when our memory is clogged with pain inflicted by people that did us wrong.  If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from their pain.  But the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory,

The only way to remove the nettle is with a surgical procedure called forgiveness.  It is not as though forgiving were the remedy of choice among other options, less effective but still useful.  It is the only remedy.

The remedy has existed since the first wrong done by one human to another.  Yet, people still punish themselves with the pains of a past long gone.  Or punish others in a futile passion to get revenge.  Tribes slaughter tribes, ethnic groups assault other ethnic groups, and gangs shoot up other gangs.  Couples break their marriages and divide their families into weeping pieces.  All because they will not make use of the one means given us for recovering from the insults and injuries of a past, which never should have been.

Why do people surrender their tomorrows to the unfair pain of their yesterdays?  The total answer lies buried somewhere in our primitive need to protect our pride, in our trembling fear of feeling weak and in our moral instincts for justice, all mingled together as a raw passion to see he how wounded us wounded in equal measure.  But I believe that the answer is also tangled in a web of misunderstanding about forgiveness itself.

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