Forgiving the wound you have to see every day

There is a particular kind of pain that only the people closest to you can cause. Not an accident, not a misunderstanding, but something done with intention, aimed to land exactly where it did. A wound like that does not stay on the surface. It goes past the skin, past the muscle, straight into the core of who you are, and it takes something with it that you do not get back. The scar heals, but the shape of what was lost stays in the outline of it forever.

I forgave the person who did that to me. It took a long time, and it took distance. For a while, keeping a healthy space between us was not bitterness, it was protection. It was how I made sure I would not set myself up to let the same thing happen again.

To me, forgiveness is not the same as pretending it never happened. It is also not the version where you say the words "I forgive you" and then reach for the memory like a weapon every time you get upset. Real forgiveness means letting it go so completely that you stop bringing it up, while still remembering enough to not walk blindly back into the same fire. You forgive, and you release, but you do not erase the lesson that keeps you safe.

Here is the hard part. Life has now put that person back into close proximity with me, daily, in a way that was not fully my choice. They do not have to say a word. Their presence alone screams in my face what they did and what it cost me. Every day it is the same silent reminder of the damage, and of the side effects that are still with me even though the wound itself has closed. If you knew the full extent of what was actually lost, you would understand why this is one of the hardest battles I face.

And still, I refuse to bring it up to them. That has already been done, many times, long ago. I refuse to let the reminder pull me backward, to undo any of the ground I fought so hard to gain, or to push me back into anything I have worked to rise above. The wound is healed. I will not reopen it just because I am forced to look at its source every day.

I do not fully understand why it all happened. I am still learning that. But I have stopped trying to force the answer out of it, because chasing the understanding was becoming its own way of going backward. Instead of trying to figure it all out, I am choosing to trust the process, and more than that, to trust and have faith in our Creator, our Father in Heaven, our savior Jesus Christ.

When you shift your focus off of needing to understand and onto the truth that God is real and faithful, something changes. You develop a new kind of protection, a peace you get to carry close to your heart, that makes the not-knowing stop costing you sleep. Whether or not I ever understand the reason no longer has the power it once did. I take comfort in knowing that my faith in a perfect Creator is all I need, because everything He does happens perfectly, at the perfect time, exactly as it was designed to.