Do we sometimes try too hard to rush forgiveness?

Do we sometimes try too hard to rush forgiveness? That's what I want to talk about on

today's edition of the To Love, Honor, and Vacuum podcast, the time where we think

about marriage more as a passionate adventure and less as a giant

to-do list. And today I want to talk about how to get that intimacy back and

how to get that passion back when there's been a big problem in your marriage that does need forgiveness.

And the problem is I don't think that we always talk about forgiveness in a really healthy way.

We often try to rush it.

We often say it in a very formulaic way. We'll tell Christians, you know, just as God

forgive you so you need to forgive each other, which is definitely in the Bible,

but it's not as simple as that that and I don't think that God ever meant it to be something that we rush through and we just tick off our list. I think he meant it to be a deep thing that we do understanding the severity of what happened

and in wisdom as we walk forward knowing the best way that we should handle the relationship

now. So let's talk about that. Now this isn't really what I've been talking about in the blog lately, but I don't want to keep the podcasts as exactly what we're talking about in the blog because sometimes I can get a little bit repetitious and so this is a theme that

keeps coming up in some emails that people are sending me, especially about how to forgive

after affairs. So I did think this was a good one to tackle. Let's say that someone is hurt really badly. Maybe it's sexual

abuse in your past, maybe some other kind of abuse, maybe a huge betrayal like

an affair, and then often they go to counselors, they go to their pastor, and what they're told is the only way to heal is to forgive that person.

In fact, God demands that you forgive.

If you don't forgive them what they did to you, then God can't forgive you.

I find that really harsh because now suddenly the person who was the victim is now

cast as being the person who is in the wrong just because they're

struggling to forgive. And then even as they're struggling with this huge hurt and

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