Forgiveness - Corrie ten Boon

Corrie ten Boon is a famous Christian author who lived through the concentration camps of World War II. Many of her family died in the death camps. Corrie lived to travel the world speaking to people about Jesus and the power of forgiveness. The Hiding Place is a powerful book that chronicles portions of her life.

Here is one event from her life about the power of forgiveness:
Corrie ten Boom told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven the person, but kept rehashing the incident and couldn’t sleep. She asked the Lord to help her put the problem behind her:
“His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.”
“Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.”
“And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force — which was my willingness in the matter — had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”
Choose to forgive and the ‘ding-dongs’ of the hurts will slowly fade away. You will find healing.