I sat down to forgive God one day. It wasn’t planned. The thought arrived quietly, the way some truths do—like a whisper slipping into the room when everything else had gone still. My heart was heavy, restless with questions I had carried for years: why would God allow us to feel pain? Why must children suffer? Why would jealousy, grief, and envy be part of the inheritance of being human?
I let my mind wander into dangerous territory—what if God had chosen differently? What if there had been, somewhere in eternity, a hesitation, a moment of second-guessing? A pause before creation, wondering if the story could be written without sorrow, without loss, without fear. A world like heaven itself, where joy reigned without shadow. Couldn’t it have been that way?
These thoughts wrapped around me until my eyelids grew heavy. I don’t know if I truly drifted off or slipped into some other kind of consciousness. What I know is that I felt warmth. A presence. As if I were seated at the feet of the Divine—not male, not female, but something vaster, something infinite. It was quiet, but the kind of quiet that holds you steady.
I lifted my face, searching for God, but no words came. My tongue felt tied, as though silence itself was the only language. Still, my heart broke open.
“I forgive You,” I whispered, almost afraid of the sound of my own voice. “I forgive You for trusting me with emotions, believing I would use them to find joy when so often they have cut me open instead. I forgive You for the envy that rises in me, the jealousy that stings when I feel others have more of Your love. I forgive You for letting me wander far away, free to make mistakes that still echo inside me.”
As the words poured out, tears slipped down my face, uninvited but honest. And then came something I did not expect: I felt God’s compassion as if it pressed against my skin, a tenderness too vast to belong to me alone. It was as though the Divine carried my pain in that moment, understood it more deeply than I ever had.
And then, the turn—sudden, quiet, undeniable. The forgiveness I thought I was giving opened into another truth. It was I who had forgotten. I had forgotten the love seeded in every heart. I had forgotten that freedom was not abandonment. I had blamed God for the very gift of being human, for the chance to choose, for the path I myself had strayed from.
“Forgive me,” I whispered now, voice shaking. “Forgive me for blaming You. Forgive me for the years I lived as though You had left me, when the Divine was within me all along. Forgive me for losing sight of the only truth You ever gave—that love was always at the center.”
The tears came harder, but they felt different now. They washed rather than burned. And then a smile broke through, unplanned, the way light splits a storm cloud. Pain eased. I understood enough, even if not everything.
In that imagined reunion—God and I, both forgiving, both receiving—I felt something like home
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