The Meaning Of Forgivenessessance In The Good, By The Shack

How much strength would it take to forgive someone who hurt your family? Does the feeling of judgment come to mind instead of forgiveness? The Shack highlights important concepts of God and true happiness. There is the acknowledgment of true strength in people and the true meaning of judgment. Then there is the most outstretched point in the novel of forgiveness. These three strong points of the novel help to structure the hidden meaning. Some would say that forgiving yourself would be the easiest, but is it really? Throughout the three top concepts of strength, judgment, and forgiveness the value of God’s love and the actions of our everyday lives come into play. In order to gain strength one must overcome the fear that’s holding them back.

God is the only one with the correct classifications to judge us all. Lady Wisdom shows this to Matt and shows him that he is actually trying to be Gods judge because he didn’t save Missy (Young, 158). There seems to be a switch in everyone where we judge anyone that we see freely. We are all victims of judging another person. Why do we do it? There are so many mistakes within all of us, we are not perfect yet we compare ourselves with everyone around us. How is it that everyone conscious or not wants to take the place of the only true judge? It’s difficult to not judge something or someone right away, but we can’t do that, based off of the fact that there is actually no true joy to it; in the end we are just hurting ourselves. For Matt he had to see that judging someone else is not his place, nor is it any of ours. We either judge to feel better about ourselves or to be rude and prove a point. We may have not even known the person yet we judge them. When Matt was told to judge where his children shall go when they die he begged Lady Wisdom to switch places. He asked to go to hell while his kids went to heaven. Once this was said the realization of judging was not fun but it was hard and painful

It’s hard to have to bite the bullet and forgive someone who might have caused us so much pain, but it’s worth it, because we are then free of the pain that that person caused us. At the end of the day the pain held inside doesn’t hurt the person who inflicted it, it hurts us. When we forgive we release ourselves of that pain, we become the bigger man. People need to be able to forgive someone as quickly as they expect for God to forgive their sins they cause every day. Matt had to face one of his biggest demons while with God. He had to forgive the man who took his child away from him. It was almost impossible for him to say that he forgave the man but when God told him that he was not a judge and to let go of the pain inside of him, Matt questioned how he could just forget what the man did so easily? God told him that forgiving is not about letting go of what people do but it is, instead setting himself free of being a judge and letting God take care of the pain and right to judge someone. God told him that he can forgive but that didn’t mean that he had to forget what he did to his family. Letting go of the pain inside of himself was worth forgiving the man, he may have needed to say he forgave the man a thousand times the first day, God said, but soon it would of gotten better for Matt (Young, 226-228). When we get hurt it’s hard for us to forgive the person who hurt us but we still have to forgive in order to move