Someone wronged me a few years ago in a way I won't detail. The specifics don't matter — you've had your version of this. The aftermath was what interested me, poetically: the weeks where I was walking around with this hot coal of resentment, burning a hole in the pocket of everything I did.
I didn't want to forgive. I wanted to be right, which is what we usually want when we've been hurt. Being right is so much tidier than being whole.
What makes grace difficult is not that we fail to understand it intellectually. Most of us understand it just fine. The difficulty is that grace asks us to give up the private satisfactions that injury offers. Injury can make you feel clear, justified, even briefly powerful. You know exactly where you stand when you are angry. Grace is murkier. It requires you to step away from the fantasy that remaining hurt will keep you safe or morally superior. That is a much less glamorous process than people pretend.
December was a fitting month for that lesson because December is always inventory season for me. I can tell more quickly at the end of a year which grudges are still alive only because I have been feeding them. Some pains deserve continued caution; I am not arguing for amnesia. But caution and resentment are not the same thing. Resentment burns hotter and gives less light. By December 2024 I knew I was tired of carrying heat that was not warming anything. I wanted my energy back. I wanted my internal weather back.
The part people do not say often enough is that grace is not the same thing as calling harm harmless. It is not revisionist history. It is not spiritual politeness. It is the decision not to let another person's wound-making remain your central source of definition. That is a very different thing. Some wrongs do not become smaller because you forgive them. They simply stop occupying the throne. Grace removes them from power. That is why it is difficult and why it matters.
Grace Over Vengeance
In the valley where hurt echoes loud, Under the heavy, brooding cloud, Temptations of revenge, whispering clear, Yet a wiser voice calls, for those who hear.
Coming soon — included in Echoes: Reflections in VersesForgiveness Unleashed belongs here because the poem understands forgiveness as release before it understands it as virtue. The soul renews not because the past becomes pleasant, but because the grip loosens. That was the actual work of December. Not winning the moral argument. Not pretending I had no anger left. Just loosening the grip enough that some other future could enter the room.
I still do not think grace is easy. If anything, I respect it more now because I know how often it must be re-chosen. But December taught me that repeated choosing changes the weather eventually. One day you notice the storm has shifted. One day the coal is no longer burning a hole through everything else you are trying to hold. That is not abstraction. That is relief. And relief is reason enough to keep choosing it.
What I wanted from that relief was not sainthood, only room. Room to think about something other than the injury. Room for tenderness to return without feeling foolish. Room for the next season to arrive without first dragging every old grievance through the doorway. Grace made that room possible in small increments. Not all at once, and not without resistance, but enough that by year's end I could tell the internal architecture had changed. That, to me, is how forgiveness becomes visible: less occupation by the old fire, more space for the life still asking to be lived.
I wrote this poem not because I had achieved grace — I wrote it as an aspiration. As a reminder to myself of who I was trying to be. Sometimes poems are maps to places you haven't arrived yet. That's allowed.