“How many people do you know who aren’t a part of a church, company, or community because of the way they were treated?  They don’t want anything to do with God because of ‘all those religious hypocrites’.  People hurt people. Somebody wronged somebody else.  And they haven’t done the work to apologize and make amends and work through it.  Some people refuse to humble themselves and do the difficult work of learning how to forgive and reconcile.”

So that poses certain initial questions:

Given the fact that people who become hurt by someone’s actions end up causing hurt towards someone else because of those past actions - who then is the total blame?  The first who caused the initial hurt and never apologized for it?  The second who caused the next hurt due to the past hurt and never got over it?  Or both?   And do we give the second guy a little slack because they are only hurting others because they were hurt by someone else in the past so it’s not entirely their fault?

I made a design that says “hurt people hurt people“.  and it’s so true.

And we all have been hurt and we all have hurt others.  And we’ve all hurt others because we’ve been hurt.  deeply.

So how do you overcome this?  And how do you heal from hurt?  It takes some time, but when is it ‘too much time’ to the point where it’s just time to “get over it already”?  

Not everyone is going to forgive.  Certainly not everyone is going to “forget”.  Not everyone is going to say sorry.  And how do you at least do your part?

And we’re all human.  Sometimes we don’t even know that we hurt someone.  Sometimes we do know we hurt someone but we don’t want to apologize because “they deserved to be hurt because of what they did to me or what they did to them.”  Is that ever an exception?

And we know it’s not easy to be biblical and “turn the other cheek”, but is it even possible if we don’t know how to actually do that?  Jesus didn’t mean it in a literal sense, so how does it happen?

And is anything we do that hurts others justifiable?

What do you think?

“At one point, the woman asked why the world was so broken and why people have such difficulty getting along.  The question seemed to have come from years of reflection.  And it wasn’t just an intellectual issue, this was something that deeply troubled her soul. ‘Why is it so hard for us to get along?  Why do we have to fight with each other? Why do we have to hurt each other and sue each other and say horrible things about each other?’  As she was saying this, I realized that what she was saying was less a series of questions and more of a lament. A grieving.
We’re disconnected with each other and we know it.  It’s not how things are supposed to be.”
                 -Rob Bell “Sex God: ‘Chapter Two: Sexy On The Inside’.”