So If I Love Ya A Little More Than I Should

Please forgive me I know not what I do
Please forgive me I can't stop lovin' you
Don't deny me

This pain I'm going through
Please forgive me
If I need ya like I do
Please believe me
Every word I say is true
Please forgive me I can't stop loving you

Act 20:

“It’s never too late… To Forgive

Forgiving releases us. Until we forgive, we’re imprisoned. It allows us to look ahead. It empowers us. It gives us positive energy. It opens up the future” – Patrick Lindsay

Quote in book: “Good, to forgive; Best, to forget” ~ Robert Browning

The minute I saw today’s act Bryan Adam’s Please Forgive Me starting playing in my head. It’s playing in the background as I type this.

I’ve heard that giving forgiveness is hard for some people. For me, I don’t feel like it’s that hard. Going back to my Myers Briggs results. I’m a super “F”. I can’t find my paperwork – so I went to Wiki “Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it 'from the inside' and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved.” I suppose that’s why it’s easy for me to forgive. Forgiveness is the easiest way to inject the balance back in the relationship after the balance is throw off by the offender. It helps everyone to get along.

My thing about forgiveness is… If the offender is seeking forgiveness, then they’ve realized they’ve “offended” or made a mistake, and at the end of the day, we all make mistakes. We all deserve forgiveness for the things that we are sorry for.

But that’s the key phrase for me… They have to be sorry or have to be seeking forgiveness. If they’re not sorry or not seeking forgiveness, in my mind… they don’t want to restore the balance in the relationship, so why forgive in that case? The only reason to still forgive is if it helps YOU in some way to forgive that person. If it gives you peace of mind, then do it.

Forgiving is the easy part. It’s the forgetting that I don’t really ever do and this is probably where it gets tricky. Should you forgive someone over and over and over again, if they keep making the same mistake? If you keep getting hurt? How many times must you beat your head against a brick wall until you finally walk away? If you forgive and forget, then you open yourself to future heartache. You open up yourself to repeat offenders w/ no hope of changing their ways, because you’ve forgotten their past transgressions. Is that realistic?

Was it Albert Einstein or Rita Mae Brown (there’s a debate) who said “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is how I feel about forgiveness and second chances. I have been known to forgive a lot of transgressions against me, but only to a certain point. Once you’ve crossed the line, you’re cut off. No amount of “I’m sorrys” or “Please forgive mes” will help, once you’ve been cut off. I’m just a bitch like that. But to be fair, I do give many many many chances and my capacity to forgive is quite large. So, you'd have to be really really bad or hurt me an awful lot for me to cut you off. So, most people are safe.

The biggest thing for me is intent. I’m much less likely to forgive, if there was malicious intent. Most of the time people don’t mean to hurt you and it’s easy to forgive them. I have a hard time forgiving those that maliciously set out to hurt someone else. If they did it on purpose, it almost always means they aren’t sorry for it when it’s over.

So for me, forgive those who want or deserve to be forgiven. Stay away or walk away from those who don’t.