If Your Pride Can’t Survive Forgiveness, Read Romans 12:19 Again
· Thought Catalog
Updated 17 hours ago, December 12, 2025
Always forgive: yes, even when it feels like forgiveness is the one thing your pride can’t survive. Not because what happened didn’t matter. Not because the wound wasn’t real. Not because you have to pretend you weren’t harmed. But because revenge will never be the place your soul finally feels whole.
There is a kind of pain that makes you want to do something with it—to make the person who hurt you feel what you felt, to balance the scales, to prove you were not weak for loving, not foolish for trusting, not naive for believing in goodness. But retaliation is a heavy way to live. It keeps your hands clenched around what happened. It keeps your heart rehearsing the injury until it becomes a permanent language. And God did not save you so you could spend your life imprisoned by someone else’s brokenness.
Forgiveness is not agreement. It is not permission. It is not forgetting. Forgiveness is release—release of the fantasy that vengeance will heal you, release of the idea that you have to become hard in order to be safe, release of the burden of being judge and jury in a world where your heart was never meant to carry that kind of weight. There are some loads you can set down and still be faithful. There are some battles you can refuse to fight and still be strong.
Scripture says not to take revenge, but to leave room for God, to trust that justice is not your job, that repayment belongs to the Lord (Romans 12:19). And sometimes that’s the hardest part: believing that if you don’t “handle it,” it won’t be handled at all. But God is not passive. He is not indifferent. He sees the full picture—every hidden motive, every quiet cruelty, every wound no one else validated. He can carry truth without twisting it into bitterness. He can hold justice without it contaminating your tenderness.
So forgive, not as a gift you hand to the person who hurt you, but as a doorway you walk through for your own freedom. Let forgiveness be the moment you stop letting their actions dictate your inner world. Let it be the point where you stop bleeding into your future because of what happened in your past. Let it be the sacred decision to trust that God can do what you cannot, make wrong things right, in his way and in his time while you heal.