Friday, April 18, 2008

Forgiveness

Everybody gets thorns or slivers stuck in their fingers every once in a while. Those sharp little splinters that are so easy to get in and so difficult to remove. It is amazing how such a small object embedded in the skin can hurt so much. Sometime they even require tweezers and a magnifying glass to pull it out. But oh the relief once it is out.

Sometimes my kids want to leave it in. They would rather live with a splinter in the finger rather than have to suffer the pinch of the tweezers. What they do not understand is what happens when you let something fester. Leaving a sliver in can lead to infection, gangrene and in extreme cases, losing the limb or even death. No one would ever leave a sliver in if they could help it.

In every relationship there are things that get under the skin. A thoughtless remark, a forgotten event or a heartless laugh can all feel like a little splinter in the soul. Like the splinter in a finger, these relationship splinters should also be removed as soon as possible. Letting an offense or hurt feeling fester can be as dangerous to a relationship as an infected wound is to the finger.

When couples have been married for a long time, one thing they seem to have in common is that they never say unkind or derogatory things about each other. Does that mean that there have never been hurt feelings? Of course not. It simply means that they have learned to not let things fester.

2 comments:

Anita Revel, author said...

Nice analogy :-)
Anita

Unknown said...

I need my husband to read this! we are having a lot of problems at the moment and he is bringing up things that he has resented me for from 4 years ago!! ..he kept it in all of this time and it has been festering for too long...