Forgiveness Didn't Come All at Once. Here's How It Actually Came.
By Crystal Virgin
"Forgiveness is not a gift you give to the person who hurt you. It is a gift you give to yourself."
A few years ago, something happened that hurt me deeply.
I'm not going to share the details — they aren't mine alone to share, and the specifics aren't really the point anyway. What I will tell you is that it felt like betrayal. Like a door I thought was safe had swung open in a way I didn't expect, and something I trusted had been broken.
I put up walls. I became anxious in spaces where I used to feel comfortable. For a long time, my relationship with these people was painful — and I hated that. I didn't want to feel that way. I didn't choose to feel that way. But the hurt had settled somewhere deep and it wasn't moving on its own.
I knew I needed to forgive. I just had no idea how.
What I Thought Forgiveness Would Feel Like
I think I expected forgiveness to arrive like a switch being flipped. One prayer, one decision, one moment of grace where the hurt just lifted and I felt differently.
That is not what happened.
What happened instead was slow and nonlinear and sometimes discouraging — because I would feel like I'd made progress and then something small would bring the anxiety rushing back and I'd wonder if I'd actually moved at all. Forgiveness, I've learned, is not a moment. It's a direction. And you have to keep choosing it long after you thought you already had.
The Prayers I Kept Praying
I have pled with the Lord over this one more than almost anything else.
Help me to see them the way you see them. Help me to be kind. Help me to be loving. Please help me not to judge them.
I prayed those words so many times they became a kind of mantra. And over time — slowly, almost imperceptibly — something began to shift. Not all at once. A little at a time. The walls didn't come down in one moment. They softened, brick by brick, prayer by prayer.
Eventually those prayers turned into affirmations I would say to myself in the hard moments. I am safe. I am loved. My life is not going to fall apart. Because the betrayal I had felt hadn't just affected my relationship with these people — it had spilled over into anxious thoughts about myself. Lies that felt true in the moment but weren't. And I had to speak truth back to myself, out loud, until it started to replace the fear.
What Changed — and How
Here is the progression, as honestly as I can describe it:
It started with bitterness. Then a long season of just trying to get through interactions without shutting down completely. Then something that felt like tolerance — not warmth, but the absence of active hostility. Then acceptance. And then, in moments that genuinely surprised me, something that felt like enjoyment. Actual enjoyment of being around them.
That was huge. I didn't see it coming.
What got me there was a combination of things. Prayer — consistent, honest, sometimes desperate prayer. Affirmations that countered the lies anxiety was telling me. And one realization that shifted everything: holding a grudge was hurting me far more than it was hurting them. The bitterness I was carrying wasn't affecting them — they may not have even known the extent of it. But it was affecting me. And it was affecting my husband, who loves both me and them and had to navigate the tension in between.
I didn't want to keep hurting the people I love in order to protect myself from people I had already been hurt by. That's not protection. That's just more pain, redistributed.
Letting Your Heart Be Shaped
What I've come to understand about forgiveness is that it requires a willingness to be changed. Not to excuse what happened. Not to pretend the hurt wasn't real or that boundaries don't matter. But to open your hands around something you've been gripping tightly and say: I am willing to let this be different.
That willingness — that posture of openness — is not something I manufactured on my own. I asked God for it repeatedly. And He gave it to me, little by little, in the form of softer thoughts, quieter moments, and the gradual ability to see these people as more than what they had done.
I am still working on it. My heart is not completely healed. But it is so much closer than it was. And I can see now, from where I'm standing, that the healing has always been moving in one direction — toward love. Slowly, imperfectly, one wrestle with God at a time.
What I Know Now
Forgiveness is not a gift you give to the person who hurt you. It is a gift you give to yourself.
It is the decision to stop letting someone else's actions determine the condition of your heart. It is the slow, hard, holy work of releasing something you had every right to hold — because holding it was costing you more than letting it go ever could.
I am not the same person I was when this started. My heart has been shaped by this process in ways I didn't ask for and am now grateful for. I have learned things about prayer, about anxiety, about the lies fear tells and how to answer them, that I don't think I could have learned any other way.
Forgiveness didn't come all at once. But it came. And it is still coming.
That, I think, is enough.
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