There is a kind of forgiveness the self-help world talks about — the kind you manufacture through willpower and positive thinking. Decide to forgive. Choose to let it go. Fake it until you make it.

And then there is the kind God offers. The kind that doesn’t come from you at all.

I’ve needed both kinds. And I can tell you from experience — only one of them actually works.

Where Compassion Begins: Exodus 34 and Psalm 103

Before we can talk about extending compassion to the people who have hurt us, we need to understand where compassion actually originates. And for that, we go to one of the most stunning moments in all of Scripture.

Moses has just lived through a catastrophe. The Israelites built a golden calf. The covenant was shattered. Moses came down the mountain and broke the tablets in grief. And in the wreckage of that moment, exhausted and heartbroken, Moses asks God something extraordinary:

“Show me your glory.” — Exodus 33:18

And God answers by showing him his goodness. His character. His name. And what pours forth in Exodus 34:6-7 becomes the foundational self-disclosure of who God is — a passage so central that it echoes through the entire rest of the Hebrew Bible:

“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” — Exodus 34:6-7

A thousand years later, David meditates on this same revelation in Psalm 103. He writes:

“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love… For he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” — Psalm 103:8,14

The Hebrew word for compassion in both passages is rachamim — and its root is rechem. The word for womb.

God’s compassion is not detached or polite. It is visceral. Instinctive. The gut-level, bone-deep love a mother has for what she carried inside her body. This is not God being nice. This is God’s nature flowing from the very core of who he is.

And here is the stunning implication for us: we are invited to draw from that same source.

A Woman in Munich, 1947

Corrie ten Boom had every human reason to hate.

She and her sister Betsie had been sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp for hiding Jewish families in their home in Holland during World War II. The conditions were unspeakable. Betsie died there. Their father died in prison. The harm done to Corrie and her family was real, documented, and devastating.

After the war, Corrie traveled the world telling people that God forgives — that there is no pit so deep that his love is not deeper still. She preached it with conviction. She believed it with her whole heart.

And then one evening after a church service in Munich, she saw him.

A former SS guard from Ravensbruck — one of the men who had stood at the shower room door as the women were processed. He was beaming, hand outstretched, telling Corrie how grateful he was for her message about God’s forgiveness.

Corrie froze. The memories came flooding back — the humiliation, Betsie’s face, the suffering. And she could not raise her hand.

She writes that she prayed desperately in that moment. First: Lord Jesus, forgive me and help me to forgive him. Nothing. No warmth. No feeling. She tried to smile and could not.

And so she prayed a different prayer. One of the most honest prayers I have ever encountered:

“Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.”

She took his hand. And something extraordinary happened — a warmth, like a current, moved from her shoulder down her arm and into their joined hands. And into her heart came a love for this man that she describes as almost overwhelming.

She had not manufactured it. She had not summoned it through discipline or willpower. She had simply made herself available for God to work through her — and he did.

The Theology in Her Prayer

What Corrie discovered in that Munich church is the same thing God revealed to Moses on the mountain. Compassion — real, transforming, enemy-level compassion — does not originate in us. It flows from the womb of God himself, through us, to the people who least deserve it from a human standpoint.

This is exactly what Jesus means in the Sermon on the Mount when he tells us to love our enemies. He is not giving us an impossible command and leaving us to white-knuckle our way through it. He is inviting us into a pipeline. His love, through us, to them.

Corrie said it best herself:

“It is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”

Read that again. He gives, along with the command, the love itself.

You are not expected to generate something you do not have. You are expected to ask for what only he can give.

When You Cannot Raise Your Hand

I want to be honest with you, because I think this is where a lot of us get stuck.

There are people in my own life I have had to forgive — and keep forgiving — at a depth that does not come naturally. People whose harm was real and lasting. People I loved who failed me. People in places of trust who misused it.

Some mornings forgiveness feels settled. Other mornings I wake up and I have to lay it down again. And on those mornings — the hard ones — I have learned to pray Corrie’s prayer rather than performing a forgiveness I don’t yet feel.

Jesus, I cannot forgive them. Give me Your forgiveness.

That prayer does something Corrie’s story confirms: it positions you to receive rather than to perform. It is not weakness. It is the most theologically honest thing you can do. You are acknowledging that this kind of love — womb-deep, enemy-reaching, rachamim love — does not come from human reserves. It comes from the God who revealed himself on the mountain as compassionate to his core.

And he gives it. Maybe not always as dramatically as a warmth moving down your arm. But he gives it. Slowly, steadily, faithfully — thread by thread — until one day you realize the bitterness has loosened its grip and something softer has taken its place.

A Prayer You Can Pray Today

If you are carrying someone today — a name, a face, a wound that still aches — I want to invite you into Corrie’s prayer. Not the performance of forgiveness, but the honest asking for it.

You don’t have to feel it first. You don’t have to manufacture warmth that isn’t there. You just have to hold out your hand — even woodenly, even mechanically, as Corrie described — and ask the God whose compassion is as deep as a mother’s love to do through you what you cannot do yourself.

He showed Moses his glory on that mountain and it looked like mercy.

He will show you the same.

For Your Own Reflection

Is there someone in your life you have been trying to forgive through willpower alone? What would it look like to pray Corrie’s prayer instead?

How does understanding rachamim — God’s womb-deep compassion — change the way you see what he asks of you?

Where have you experienced God giving you the love along with the command — something you could not have generated yourself?

[ EDITOR NOTE: Link back to Post 1 — “The Weaver in the Dark” here ]