Someone hurt you, maybe yesterday, maybe long ago, and you cannot forget it. You did not deserve the hurt and it has lodged itself in your memory, where it keeps on hurting.

You are not alone. We all muddle our way through a world where even well-meaning people hurt one another. A friend betrays us; a parent abuses us; a spouse leaves us.

For most of us, however, it is not easy to forgive. Forgiving seems almost unnatural. Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do. But in forgiving we can move from hurting and hating to healing and reconciliation.

Hate is our natural response to deep and unfair hurts. A woman wishes her former husband would be miserable with his new wife. A man whose friend has betrayed him hoped the friend will be fired from his job. Hate is a malignancy that festers and grows, stifling joy and threatening our health. It hurts the hater more than the hated. It must be cut out -- for our own sake.

How can this be done? How can you let go of a hurt, the way a child opens his hands and frees a trapped butterfly? Here are guidelines to help you begin to forgive:

1. Confront your malice.
   None of us wants to admit that we hate someone, so we hide it from ourselves. But the fury denied rages beneath the surface and infects all our relationships. Admitting our hate compels us to make a decision about the surgery of the soul we call forgiving. We must acknowledge what has happened, face up to the other person and say:"You did me wrong."

2. Separate the wrongdoer from the wrong.
   The Bible describes, in the ancient drama of atonement, how God took a bundle of human sins off man's back, tied it to a goat, and sent the "scapegoat" to a "solitary land." Forgiving is finding a new vision of the person who has wronged us, the person stripped of his sins -- who really lives beneath the cloak of his wrong doing. The first gift we get when we separate the wrong from the wrongdoer is insight. As we come to see the deeper truth about people -- that they are fallible -- our feelings change.

3. Let go of the past.
   This does not mean you has entirely forgotten the hurt. In fact, forgetting too soon may be a dangerous way to escape forgiving's inner surgery. Once we have forgiven, however, forgetting is a sign of health. We can forget, eventually, because we are healed.

4. Don't give up on forgiveness -- keep working at it.
   The hate habit is hard to break. We usually break it many times before we finally get rid of it. And the deeper the hurt, the longer it can take. But slowly it happens.

Persuasive arguments have been made against forgiving. Some say that forgiveness is unjust because the wrongdoer should not be let off the hook. Others say forgiveness is a sign of weakness. Bernard Shaw called it "a beggar's refuge."

I disagree. Vengeance never evens the score. It ties both the injured and the injurer to an endless escalator of retaliation. Gandhi was right: If we all live by the "eye for an eye" brand of justice, the whole world would be blind. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said after World War II:"We must finally be reconciled with our foe, lest we both perish in the vicious circle of hatred." Forgiveness breaks the grip that past wrong and pain have on our minds.

To understand forgiveness, we should keep in mind that we are seldom merely sinned against.

When we forgive, we come as close as any human to the essentially divine act of creation. We heal the hurt and create a new beginning out of past pain.

[Sections cited from "Open the Door to Forgiveness-by Lewis B.Smedes"]