Sep. 13, 2026 - When we have been hurt

Have you ever carried a hurt that just will not let go? Maybe it was something said in a moment of anger, and somehow you can still remember exactly where you were standing when you heard it. Maybe it was a betrayal, or a friendship that broke, or a family relationship that fractured and never quite healed. Maybe you thought you had moved past it — you really believed that — and then something small and unexpected brought it all rushing back like no time had passed at all.

That is what hurt does. It loops. It lingers. And when it does, most of us end up asking the same quiet question Peter asked Jesus in Matthew 18: how many times am I supposed to forgive this?

Peter thought he was being generous. Seven times, he offered. If someone wrongs you seven times, surely that's enough, right? But Jesus didn't give him a number to count toward. He said seventy-seven times — or seventy times seven, depending on the translation you're reading. And either way, the math isn't really the point. Jesus wasn't handing Peter a tally sheet. He was describing a whole way of life.

But before we go any further with that, can we just pause and be honest about something? Forgiveness is hard. It is especially hard when the hurt is real.

We have a habit, in church spaces, of talking about forgiveness like it should come quickly and cleanly. Like one sincere prayer and a good night's sleep should be enough to dissolve the pain. But is that how it actually works for you? For most of us, when someone has wounded us, what shows up is anger, grief, sadness, fear. We want them to understand what they did. And if we're being completely honest with each other, sometimes we want them to feel exactly what we felt. That's not something to be ashamed of. That's just being human. And here's the thing — forgiveness cannot even begin until we're willing to name what's actually going on inside of us.

God can handle the truth. That's not the end of forgiveness. That's where it starts.

There's an image in the book of Exodus that gets at this in a way I love. In Exodus 14, the Israelites have just been set free from Egypt, and Pharaoh's army is closing in behind them. They are terrified. Everything they thought they had escaped — the oppression, the fear, the weight of it all — is chasing them down. And in that exact moment, God moves. The cloud, the presence of God, shifts to stand between the people and what was pursuing them. God puts himself right in the middle.

Sit with that for a second, because I think it says something to anyone who has ever felt like the past was catching up with them. Sometimes that's exactly what hurt feels like, isn't it? You left the situation, but the situation didn't fully leave you. The relationship ended, but the memory is still there. Maybe you even got the apology, but the wound is still tender to the touch. And yet this story tells us God does not leave us alone in that place. God comes and stands in the middle of it, between us and everything we're afraid will catch us.

We are not meant to carry our hurt by ourselves. We can bring God our anger. We can bring our grief, our disappointment, even the part of us that wants a little bit of revenge. We can be honest and say we are not ready to forgive yet. And we can trust that God is still right there.

Jesus follows up his answer to Peter with a story about a servant who owed a debt so large it could never be repaid. The king cancels the whole thing — total mercy, no strings attached. And then that same servant turns around, finds someone who owes him a small amount, and refuses to show even a fraction of the mercy he was just given.

It's an uncomfortable story to sit with, honestly, because there's something familiar in it. Haven't we all needed mercy at some point? Haven't we all disappointed someone, needed patience we didn't deserve? And yet when we're the ones who've been hurt, offering that same mercy can feel almost impossible.

Jesus isn't telling this story to minimize anyone's pain, or to pressure a person into forgiving before they're ready. That would just be one more weight on top of a weight already too heavy to carry. Forgiveness was never meant to silence pain. What it can do, in time, is keep us from being defined completely by the hurt we've been through.

And that process looks different for every single person. Sometimes forgiveness looks like sitting down with someone and actually working through what happened. Sometimes the person who hurt you isn't around anymore, or isn't able to understand what they did. Sometimes a relationship has changed because of illness, or age, or circumstances nobody had any control over. Sometimes forgiveness means letting go of the hope that someone will go back to who they used to be. And sometimes — maybe more often than we admit — it means forgiving yourself. For being angry. For needing space. For not having the strength you wish you'd had in the moment.

There are things we will not get to fix this side of heaven. Relationships we cannot restore. People who will never fully understand what they did. But we can bring every bit of it into God's presence and ask for help.

That's where forgiveness actually becomes possible. Not through some sudden shift in how we feel, but through a willingness to just begin. A prayer as small as: God, I am hurt. I don't know what to do with this. Help me.

That's enough to start with. And over time, that prayer tends to grow. Help me let go of what I cannot change. Help me stop carrying this the way I've been carrying it. Help me find peace, even if this relationship never becomes what I hoped it would be.

Forgiveness doesn't erase the past. It doesn't say what happened was okay. It doesn't ask you to forget, or to go back to something that hurt you. What it offers — slowly, in its own time — is a way to stop letting the hurt be the only thing that defines you.

God's grace is bigger than any wound we're carrying. And God is not finished with us yet. The story is still being written, every single day, even in the middle of our pain.