Forgiving...

"Somehow forgiveness, with love and tolerance, accomplishes miracles that can happen in no other way". Gordon B. Hinckley
Today at church I thought alot about forgiveness and repentance. What essential attributes it is to have in this life. Christ himself, gave us these gifts for us to use to progress and make ourselves better. If we dont use it we are really taking his sacrifice for granted and not showing our gratitude for his life. We cannot progress when we have feelings of discontent and unkindness towards someone in our life. From my experience we cannot be happy if we have these kinds of feelings weighing us down day to day. When someone offends us we tend to have hurt feelings and turn the blame on that person 100%. Have you ever thought about what happens in a situation where someone has offended us? We automatically want to make ourselves feel better and so we think about the bad things that person has done to us and others and basically drag that person's name through the mud, just to make those feelings of hurt go away. But in reality, we arent making those bad feelings go away we are becoming just as bad as the person who hurt our feelings by acting in this manner. We are just as accountable for the bad situation because of how we decided to handle it. Does this make sense? Forgiveness works on both sides. I have found that it is so hard to be the "better" person so to speak and be the one to say sorry and apologize. But I think its even harder when someone has hurt our feelings to turn the other cheek and instead of being offended and mad...be the one who forgives another for their trespasses. Just letting that person know that you feel hurt by their actions or words and tell them you forgive them right away instead of making a big deal about it. I really think that one of the biggest things we are going to be judged in this life about is how we treated other people. Christ was the ultimate example of loving those around him unconditionally no matter what. Even when he was hanging on the cross he said to our Heavenly Father "Father please forgive them for they know not what they do". Such powerful words. Words that penetrate my heart when I hear them. Christ was dying and asking for forgiveness for the people that are killing him.
We might think somethings in life are unforgivable but this example proves other wise. A bishop of mine once said to me "You dont have to forgive today or even tomorrow but as long as you are working on it, you are making progress to becoming a better person and to be at peace with that person" Such wonderful advice and I know it changed my life.
I was just thinking about these things today and wanted to share. I hope that I can be more apt to forgiving. And I hope that we can make miracles happen by using repetance and forgiveness in our lives, they go hand in hand.