Hi friends, and welcome to Robcast 42. This is the fifth part of a five-part series on forgiveness.

The series is called the forgiving flow, and this part five is called power, presence,

control, and surprises. You all have been sending in questions about forgiveness, and so I've

been reading through them, and what's really fascinating is to see how many of you are asking

questions, some of the same exact questions. What I want to do is respond to a number of those

questions. I've sort of tried to group them into a number of categories, and once again, you can keep

saying in questions, maybe we'll just in the future do another forgiveness series or do another

podcast where I sort of follow up on some of these themes, because really entering into the

forgiving flow is something you're always entering into, because we live in the real world, right?

We get hurt all the time, and so forgiveness is like this muscle that you keep exercising.

So a couple of questions, does forgiveness include restoring trust? No.

Forgiveness and the restoration of trust are two different things, and here's why.

Somebody hurts you and they break trust with you. You set out on a path to forgive them

no matter what they choose to do. They may earn your trust back. They may not. They may become the

kind of person, again, who you can trust a year from now or 10 years from now. We don't know. What

we do know is that you are carrying around a wound, and if you don't forgive them, you are robbing

yourself of joy. If your forgiveness is contingent or dependent upon what somebody else does or

doesn't do, then you may never get around to forgiving them. Now, we'll get to the relationship

between forgiveness and time and control in a minute. But let's just go next. Does forgiving

mean reconciling in the best of times and the best of relationships? Yes. Just like trust. In the best

of relationships, somebody did something. You feel like they broke trust, but then you patch it

up. Things are good. You realized there was just a misunderstanding. You trust them away you go,

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