BLOG SERIES: WHEN FORGIVNESS IS HARD – Part 7: What the Weaver was doing all along

“And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”  — Philippians 4:7 CSB

You don’t notice when it happens.

There’s no morning where you wake up and feel a door swing open, no dramatic moment where the weight lifts and you know the work is finished. It’s quieter than that. More ordinary. You’re just living your life, showing up to your quiet time, bringing the same names and the same wounds to the same God, and somewhere in the accumulated faithfulness of all those ordinary mornings, something has shifted.

I noticed it first in the creativity. Words that used to come like pulling teeth were just… there. Ideas arriving before I could write them down fast enough. A retreat taking shape in my mind before I’d even fully decided to do it. Something in me that had been dammed up for years was moving again, and I didn’t know why until I sat still long enough to trace it back to its source.

The source was surrender. Daily, unglamorous surrender. Hands open every morning before the day could have any of me, releasing the same people and the same grief and the same need to understand and control, trusting the same God with the same wounds I’d brought him the morning before. I had not arrived anywhere dramatic. I had simply stayed faithful to the direction, one morning at a time, and the Weaver had been working in threads I couldn’t see.

Healing didn’t announce itself. I just looked up one morning and realized the ground was soft again.

The Thread Running Through All of It

When we started this series back in Post 1, we sat with Joseph in a pit and a prison and watched God do something that had no name in English — hashav, the weaver’s word, the deliberate interworking of dark threads into something purposeful and whole. What you meant for evil, God meant for good. The thread of suffering woven into a larger design only visible from above.

I didn’t know then that we were also describing the entire arc of what this series would become. Because that is exactly what has happened — in Joseph’s life, and in mine, and perhaps in yours.

Look at the threads we have walked through together.

Post 1 — The Weaver in the Dark: God takes what was meant to destroy you and weaves it into purpose. The wound is real. So is his intention.

Post 2 — When You Cannot Forgive: His mercy — rachamim, the womb-deep compassion of a God who cannot stop loving — is the well you draw from when your own runs dry.

Post 3 — Don’t Give Him the Ground: Unforgiveness hands the enemy a deed to territory that was never his. You have the authority, in Christ, to take it back.

Post 4 — Why You Feel Stuck: The root of bitterness occupies space that was meant for life. When you finally surrender it, God fills what bitterness had been holding.

Post 5 — The Most Dangerous Prayer: Agape — willed goodness toward someone who wounded you — is a direction before it is ever a feeling. You open the channel. He supplies the love.

Post 6 — From Inside the Wound: Jesus forgave from the cross while the nails were still in. Aphiemi — release — is a choice made in the will before the feelings catch up.

Six threads. Six hard, necessary, costly threads. And this seventh post is the finished edge of the tapestry — the place where you can finally step back and see what the Weaver has been making.

It Was Never One Moment

The transformation I am describing did not happen in a single prayer. It happened in a thousand of them.

Every morning I came back to the altar. Every morning I laid down the same names, the same losses, the same grief over my children carrying weight that wasn’t theirs to carry. Every morning I chose the direction of open hands, even when the feeling was nowhere near the choice. Some mornings I meant it fully. Some mornings…not so much. God received both with the same patience, the same mercy, the same inexhaustible supply of grace that had been there the morning before.

That is abiding. That is what Jesus means in John 15 when he says remain in me — not a single dramatic act of surrender but a sustained, daily, returning kind of faithfulness. The branch doesn’t produce fruit by straining. It produces fruit by staying connected to the vine. The life flows from the connection, not from the effort.

The forgiveness I practiced every morning was not the discipline of a strong woman. It was the obedience of a dependent one. I could not produce what God was asking me to give. I could only stay connected to the One who could, and let it flow through me toward the people who had taken things from me I could never get back.

I wasn’t strong enough to forgive. I was surrendered enough to let God do it through me. That is a different thing entirely.

What Grew When the Root Came Out

Before I knew it was happening, before I could have named it or measured it, God was pulling the root of unforgiveness out of my life. Gradually. Quietly. The way roots come out of softened ground — not all at once, but giving way inch by inch until the day you realize the grip is gone.

And what grew in the space it left behind was more than I had thought to ask for.

Peace came first. Real peace — the Philippians 4 kind, the kind Paul says surpasses understanding, and I used to read that as a poetic way of saying it’s very good. I understand it differently now. He means it literally. This peace has no rational explanation given what is still true in my life. The hard relationships are still hard. The grief still visits when it wants to. The storms did not stop. And underneath all of it, steady and unhurried and entirely unmoved by the weather, is a peace that stands watch over my interior life like a sentinel at the gate. It was not there before. It is undeniably there now. And it arrived not when my circumstances resolved but when I stopped insisting they had to before I could rest.

Joy followed — and I want to be careful to describe it accurately because joy has been misrepresented to suffering women for too long. This is not happiness. Happiness lives on the surface and rises and falls with what is happening around you. Joy lives underneath. Joy is the deep-down settled knowledge that you are held, that your story is being written by hands that know what they are doing, that the darkest chapters are woven into something larger and more beautiful than you can see from inside them. Joy showed up in my ordinary mornings before it showed up anywhere else. In my coffee and my Bible and my dogs at my feet and the specific quality of early light through a window. It was quiet. It was real. It has not left.

Creativity came rushing in like water finding its level. The writing, the retreats, this series — none of it existed before the surrender. I had been trying for years to build something from a place that woundedness had hollowed out, wondering why nothing would hold, wondering why the words wouldn’t come. When the root came out and the ground cleared, things grew. Quickly, abundantly, in directions I had not planned and could not have orchestrated.

And then — this is the part I am still a little astonished by — compassion came. For the very people who caused the most damage. I cannot explain this except to say it is entirely a work of God and entirely a fruit of the daily surrender, because I did not pursue it and I could not have produced it. But somewhere in the accumulated mornings of bringing those people before God with open hands, something in me began to see them differently. The blindness Jesus named from the cross — they don’t know what they are doing — I began to see it. The brokenness underneath the harm. The wounds underneath the wounding. And something in me, not from my own reserves but from the deep well of a God whose compassion never runs dry, began to move toward them.

Compassion for the people who hurt me most was the last thing I expected and the clearest sign that the Weaver had been doing something I couldn’t see.

Now to Him

Paul closes his letter to the Ephesians with a doxology — a declaration of praise — that I have held close through every season of this healing journey. He writes, “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us — to him be glory.”

Far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.

I did not ask for creativity. I asked to survive. I did not ask for joy. I asked to stop hurting. I did not ask for compassion toward the people who wounded me. I asked God to help me forgive them and leave it at that. I did not ask for a retreat ministry or a writing life or the ability to sit with women in their pain and recognize myself in their stories.

I asked for open hands. I showed up every morning and I asked for open hands.

And the God who is able to do far more than we ask or imagine — he took those open hands and filled them with more than I had the faith to request. He wove the dark threads into something I could not have designed. He pulled the root and planted something that has grown beyond anything I planted. He did it gradually, quietly, in the accumulated ordinary faithfulness of a thousand surrendered mornings, and one day I looked up and realized the tapestry was already more beautiful than anything I had been trying to build on my own.

I asked for open hands. He filled them with more than I had the faith to ask for. That is who he is.

This is the hope I want to leave you with at the end of this series. Whatever you are carrying, whoever you have been unable to forgive, however long the root has been there and however deep it goes — the Weaver is not finished. The thread is not wasted. The morning you are in right now is not the last word on your story.

Show up tomorrow. Bring what you have. Open your hands.

He will do the rest. He always does.

Questions to Sit With

1. Looking back over this series, which post met you most personally? What did God show you through it?
2. What has daily surrender looked like for you — or what might it look like if you began tomorrow morning?
3. Is there a fruit you have been longing for — peace, joy, creativity, compassion — that you haven’t connected to the practice of forgiveness? What would it mean to make that connection?
4. What thread of your story have you been calling a mistake that God might be calling a thread in the tapestry?