BLOG SERIES: WHEN FORGIVENESS IS HARD – Part 4: What I couldn’t see until God cleared it all out

“If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.” — Matthew 5:23–24 CSB

I thought the problem was my schedule

That’s the story I told myself for a long time — that the reason my creativity had gone quiet was because life was loud, because I was stretched thin between two homes and a full caseload and kids who needed me and a ministry that was just beginning to take shape. And there was truth in that. Life was loud. I was stretched thin. But I’ve been stretched thin before, and something was different this time. Something wasn’t just tired. Something was blocked.

I would sit down to write and feel like I was pressing against something I couldn’t name. I’d show up to pray and feel the distance I couldn’t close. I’d come to worship and go through the motions and wonder why the ceiling felt so low. I wasn’t in crisis. I wasn’t falling apart. I was just… flat. Functioning but not flowing. Present but not fully alive in the way I knew I was supposed to be.

What I didn’t understand yet was that I was grieving something I’d never given myself permission to grieve. I was carrying an unforgiveness so old and so quietly managed that I’d stopped recognizing it as unforgiveness at all. I’d filed it under moved on, under given it to God, under that was then and this is now. I thought I’d set it down. What I’d actually done was learn to carry it more efficiently.

The Dream I Never Buried

There was a version of my life I’d imagined for a very long time — an intact family, a husband who stayed, a version of motherhood that looked the way I’d always pictured it. I loved that dream fiercely. I held onto it long past the point when the evidence suggested I should let it go, and when it finally ended, I did what a lot of us do. I kept moving. I survived the separation, survived the rebuilding, survived the years that followed, and at some point told myself I was healed because I was still standing.

But surviving isn’t the same as releasing. And I had never really released it. I had never sat down in front of God and said, this dream is dead, and I am handing you my grief over that, and I am choosing to trust that what you have for me is better than what I was trying to hold onto. I’d said versions of those words. I hadn’t meant them all the way through.

And tangled up inside that grief, like roots under the surface of a garden bed, was unforgiveness. Not dramatic, not seething, not something I could have pointed to on a Tuesday morning and named clearly. Just the quiet, stubborn structure of a story I was still telling — about what had been taken from me, about what I hadn’t gotten, about the ways my children had been affected by choices that weren’t theirs to make. I wasn’t walking around angry. I was walking around managed. And managed pain has a cost that most of us spend years refusing to calculate.

I thought I’d given it to God. What I’d actually done was hand him the surface and keep the roots.

What Jesus Knows About the Altar

There’s a moment in the Sermon on the Mount that I used to read right past, and now I can’t get through it without stopping. Jesus is teaching about worship, about coming before God with your offering, and in the middle of it he says something that interrupts everything: if you get to the altar and remember that something is unresolved between you and someone else, leave the gift. Don’t push through. Don’t perform the ritual anyway. Go deal with it first, and then come back.

That’s not a logistical footnote. That’s a theological statement about how we’re made and how access to God actually works. Jesus is saying there is a direct connection between what we’re holding and what we’re able to receive, that you cannot arrive fully at the altar with a closed fist, that the gift requires open hands and open hands require release.

He says it again, differently, just a few verses later, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” Pure in heart doesn’t mean perfect. It means undivided. Singular. Not split between what we’re professing out loud and what we’re quietly managing on the inside. And the promise attached to that undividedness is staggering — they will see God. Present tense. Not someday. Now. In their ordinary days. In their work. In their creativity. In the places they’ve been straining toward and wondering why it feels so far.

I had been straining toward that seeing for years. I didn’t know the straining itself was part of the problem.

The Thing I Didn’t Know I Was Waiting For

I can’t point to a single morning where everything changed. It was more like a long season of slowly unclenching — of choosing, over and over, to loosen my grip on the story I’d been telling, to stop managing the pain and start actually offering it, to trust that God’s sovereignty over my life and my children’s lives was real even when I couldn’t see how.

I surrendered the dream. Not just the marriage — the whole picture. The intact family. The version of motherhood I’d imagined. The story I’d told myself about what my life was supposed to look like and who was responsible for the gap between that story and reality. I laid it all down, not because none of it mattered, but because holding it was costing me more than I could keep paying. And somewhere in the middle of that laying down, the unforgiveness went with it. Not because I decided to forgive in some heroic act of will, but because I finally trusted God enough to stop being the one in charge of it.

And what he did in the space that created — I am still not sure I have the right words for it.

He cleared it out. That is the only way I know how to say it. Like he walked into rooms I had sealed off for years and opened every window. Like something that had been pressing on my chest for so long I’d forgotten what it felt like without it just… lifted. The hurt didn’t disappear — I want to be honest about that, because anyone who tells you surrender makes the pain stop is selling something. But the weight underneath the hurt, the weight of managing it and protecting it and carrying it alone, that left.

He didn’t fix me. He emptied me. And what rushed into that space was him.

The retreat happened after that. The writing came back after that. The Substack, the curriculum, the creativity that now moves through me in ways that used to feel impossible — all of it flows from that place of release. This is not a coincidence. There is a direct line between what I let go of and what I was finally able to receive. I didn’t know until the stuck was gone that the stuck had a name. And its name was a grief I’d been carrying, and an unforgiveness I’d been managing, and a dream I’d never properly buried.

What Your Body Already Knows

The science has been catching up to Scripture on this for decades, and it’s worth knowing because sometimes our bodies understand what our theology hasn’t caught up to yet. Chronic unforgiveness — the low-level, long-term carrying of old wounds — keeps the nervous system in a state of sustained alert. Your body cannot tell the difference between a threat that is happening now and a memory it is still holding. It responds the same way either way, which means cortisol stays elevated, inflammation stays elevated, and the capacity for deep rest, for creative freedom, for the kind of unhurried joy that feels like it belongs to a different version of you — all of it is quietly taxed.

Women in particular tend to absorb relational pain in their bodies. We carry it in our chests and our necks and our guts long after the situation that caused it has changed, because the nervous system does not release based on a decision alone. The release has to go somewhere deeper than the mind. It has to reach the places where the story actually lives.

Scripture knew this. The language of forgiveness in the Bible is almost never cerebral — it’s always physical. Heavy burdens. Broken hearts. Weary souls finding rest. He didn’t say rest for weary minds. Souls. The whole person. The places that don’t get addressed by simply deciding to think differently.

So if you are tired in a way that sleep doesn’t touch, if worship has felt effortful for longer than you can explain, if there is a flatness in your spiritual life that faithful showing-up hasn’t been able to move — that is not weakness. That is information. Your body might be telling you something your theology has been too polite to say out loud.

An Invitation, Not an Indictment

I want to be careful here, because teaching like this can slide quickly into guilt, and guilt is not what Jesus is after in Matthew 5. He doesn’t interrupt the altar scene to shame the worshiper. He interrupts it because he wants the worshiper there, fully, with nothing held back — and he loves us enough to tell us the truth about what’s in the way.

This is not about earning your way back to God’s favor. Grace is already finished. What Jesus is describing is something more relational than a transaction — he’s describing the kind of closeness that can’t happen when part of you is still sealed off, still managing, still trying to be in charge of something only he can carry. He’s not closing the door. He’s clearing the path.

“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” — Matthew 11:28 CSB

The weariness he’s describing isn’t just a hard week. It’s the bone-deep exhaustion that settles into a person who has been carrying weight for too long without setting it down. And the rest he’s offering isn’t recovery. It’s release. Put it here. Let me have it. Stop being the one in charge of this.

The next two posts in this series are going to get harder before they get easier — we’re going to talk about loving enemies and about forgiving from inside the wound, and neither of those things is small. But I wanted to stay here for a moment first, in this middle space, and ask you the questions I had to sit with before I was ready to move.

What are you still managing alone? What dream have you survived without grieving? What unforgiveness have you filed under moved on — and what has the carrying of it quietly cost you?

You don’t have to have the answers right now. Just be willing to let the questions do their work.

Questions to Sit With

1. Is there a dream you survived but never grieved? What would it mean to finally let go of it?
2. What have you told yourself you’ve forgiven — but you realize you’re still managing on your own?
3. Where in your body do you feel the weight of what you’re carrying? What is it trying to tell you?
4. What would it look like to trust God’s sovereignty over the thing you’ve been trying to control?

This is part 4 of 7. Start at the beginning with Post 1: The Weaver in the Dark