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Essay about A Look Inside Forgiveness

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Everyone has the control within them to forgive or not to forgive someone. Forgiveness comes down to taking responsibility for the choices we make and doing what we believe is right. By forgiving others, authority of our own lives can be regained by letting go of the conflicting objects from the past and moving into a more significant direction. The world today is full of conflict and people are being hurt every day. Conflict is seen today in politics, between countries, and between your average everyday people. Conflicts such as those listed above are often shaping the atmosphere we live in and shaping the person we are today. We can see that forgiveness is a place to start when trying to resolve conflicts, but not everyone will …show more content…

It is instead a lesson to be taken in and learned from the past by looking ahead without holding in the pain. In the case that an agreement cannot be met, there will instead be an opportunity to learn from the past. In the Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal was one of the many Jews working in a concentration camp of the Holocaust (Wiesenthal 3). Wiesenthal was one of fifty men chosen to work at a hospital for Nazi soldiers when the work at the concentration camp was done (Wiesenthal 11). As the Jews marched to the Nazi hospital they came across a cemetery of dead soldiers (Wiesenthal 14). Wiesenthal envied each of the soldiers, as every one of them was connected to the earth by a sunflower on top of their gravestones (Wiesenthal 14). He states, “For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me” (Wiesenthal 14). As Wiesenthal sat inside the hospital and listened to the dying Nazi man, he found the man soon asking for forgiveness for the sins he had committed against the Jews (Wiesenthal 54). Wiesenthal did not grant forgiveness to the dying Nazi man as he felt he could not speak for every Jew that had been tortured or even killed (Wiesenthal 98). Many people often get caught up in the desire to be forgiven that they forget to think about who can grant forgiveness before approaching them. In the instance that Wiesenthal did not forgive the man

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