Does God Forgive Me? Essay

As I helplessly watch my fifteen year old roommate fall to pieces in front of me, I feel everything around me slow to a crawl. Blood pounds my ear drums, I feel the color drain from my cheeks, and my feet take me forward as if they have a mind of their own. I fall to my knees and suddenly everything speeds up again – the pounding in my ear drums intensifies, my hands are trembling but I manage to grasp the side of the bed in an attempt to bring myself close to her. Her face is buried into her sheet. Muffled screaming escapes her as I whisper gentle reassurances in her ear, hoping with everything I have that she can hear me. I know she doesn’t. Even if she does, she can’t make sense of it right now. She’s stuck somewhere else, somewhere she revisits every day of her life and every time she closes her eyes to sleep.

Often we are asked the question, can justice and forgiveness go hand in hand? A lot of people believe they can’t. That only one can exist not the other. For some it’s true, they only believe someone can either give forgive, or justice, neither both. Then there are the few people who believe they go hand in hand, one can’t exist without the other. That’s true as well. I’m not sure where I stand exact on the line for these two, maybe exactly on the line. I believe they go hand in hand and in some cases only one works, all depending on the situation. Now we’ve read a number of stories regarding this, but most of them doing with forgiveness and justice going hand in hand. I’m going to talk about a few of these stories, and see where you fall

This is very hard for the boy, because he loves his father and doesn’t like watching him in such a terrible state. The boy doesn’t like talking about his dreams or his thoughts, because he knows that they will upset his father. When the father tries to have a conversation with the boy, the boy simply tells his father, “I don’t want to talk about anything” (McCarthy 269). The father knows that the boy thinks about a lot of stuff, and just wants insight of what’s going on in his head. After sitting for a while, the boy says, “I don’t have good dreams anyway.

What do you want to pass down to your children? From the beginning of time having a family was important. Astonishingly, to have children and pass the family name down is still a blessing today. Teaching the future generation traits and qualities is essentially creating tomorrow’s leaders. This question makes me consider how one simple act can mold people’s lives and accordingly create a chain reaction. One trait I aspire for my children to inherit is my quality of forgiveness. Forgiveness changed my perspective in the world by understanding how much of an impression it has on the world’s faith, perseverance, and love.

My oldest brother was hammering on the door, shouting to open it. While I stood there, frozen in fear that this moment in time would never end. He asked why my brother and I didn’t want to be with him, what had he done wrong, how could he make things better? Next he tried to persuade me to come live with him, that he would “change,” but I knew that would never happen with him and he would go straight to being a patriarchal dick of a father that would threaten his children with a

When presented with trauma and challenges, Liesel kept up an optimistic view of the world. At night Liesel had nightmares of the train ride to her new family and, “Her brother’s face. Staring at the floor.” Yet throughout the trauma she knew to look for the good within the bad. Every night Liesel woke up to the nightmares and knew to wait for her Papa to come and comfort her.

Then came my brother’s illness. Within the span of less than a week, I was hurled into the real world: a world of uncertainty, adults, and death. Death had finally reached my front door. For four months, he waited there, but would not come in. This time, he was expected. After about three months, and for the first time in my life, I truly feared Death and its power. Unlike with the first three boys, death was more expected. My brother was not eating, not walking, and was showing no signs of improvement. Looking back on it now, I realize that to the adults, it probably seemed like only a matter of time. With my childlike faith, however, this did not seem like a possibility, or at least I told myself that. My brother could not die, he was not like those other boys. Yet he was, to Death’s cold, indiscriminate eye, my brother was exactly the same. However, as I have learned, Death does not care. Death did not care that my brother had been bedridden in a hospital for the past few months or that another boy was just trying to enjoy a pool-party, because he eventually decided to leave my brother alone. He left our home’s doorway with only the smudge of his fingerprints on the

Twenty-one years old my middle brother began to drink constantly on a regular basis. Problems back home had influenced him in drinking, but also the people he correlated himself with back then. He took quite some time to overcome his addiction, but during his intoxicated moments he resembled that of Victor’s family. One night during my brother’s intoxication my brother had come down to our house to get away. When my brother rang the doorbell, I quickly rushed towards the door, opening it to find my brother’s eyes bloodshot red. Walking in face forwards he slowly took what felt like one hundred paces to our red couch, which already contained a few broken springs on the left cushion. Once reaching the target he plopped down like a heavy book

I on the other hand, was always the quiet girl who just got her work done and never strayed from the rules. I thought my brother was an imbecile before he left for college, always valuing trouble way more than diligence. When he left, I thought there was hope in the world. Like if my brother could do it, then I could too. When he came home, those expectations were shattered. There was constant fighting between Joseph and my parents. Arguments would echo throughout my household and create a thick tension that felt heavy in the air. Their voices would penetrate my room and bounce off the walls until they surrounded me. They would argue about basically anything. Joseph just had a constant itching to be right even when he was dead wrong. Our family slowly but surely became miserable with one another, like we were no longer family, but instead we were just people living in the same house. I dove deeply into reading and writing, hoping to drown out the sound of the obsessive combativeness that plagued my home. It triggered anxiety for me when he came home. I now have a deeply rooted fear

“I am petrified. I feel as if God has abandoned me. I just sat there and watched, quietly, because I had no idea what to do. As if these kind of things are normal for a 10 year old boy to witness. Everyone tells me that “it wasn’t your fault” or that “there was nothing you could have done.” I think I believe them… but the haunting images of my 16 year old brother being beaten to death tell me otherwise. The memories tell me I should have done something to save him. But I didn’t. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what happened to my best friend and my brother.”

the shadows of the world on the dancing screens. But now I too was in the world.

This spoke to me, offering conviction immediately into my own heart. I knew my brother was healthy and strong, but for some reason, I kept seeing my brother as his. With every cruel treatment, with every uneasy situation, I could feel myself getting angry, but at who? My mind would snap to placing blame on others, but this time I couldn’t help but see it solely on

Ellie and I lay in our beds, neither one of us knew what to say. In the other room, our host parents were arguing. We didn’t know what about, but we knew it was serious. Then we heard a “THWACK” followed by silence. Ellie and I sat up in our beds and looked at each other, I could tell she was as scared as I was. “Was that? Did he just?” she asked me. Then the arguing started back up again. We calmed back down until we heard it again. “THWACK” We knew then, the noise we heard, was him beating her. We got up, our hearts racing; neither of us knew what to do. We got our nerves together to go get help. When we opened the door to our room we saw the children sitting on the couch crying out for their mother. I could see the fear in their face and I knew something needed to change.

I find that this topic relates both each story but also it relates to daily life. The topic of God’s forgiveness helps to relate many biblical including Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. Forgiveness is shown in each of these biblical stories helping to link it to other stories where Gods forgiveness is evident. Each of these stories is based on a character’s temptation or betrayal of Christ as well as proving to God that they are worthy of him. In each of these betrayal stories, God uses these characters to display his mercifulness and forgiveness through his actions towards his followers. As well as, linking each of these stories through the theme of forgiveness, this topic is relatable daily. Just as the characters in the biblical stories stray,

Forgiveness is a hard thing to give because forgiveness of another human being involves having you to forgive yourself. It seems a lot easier to withhold forgiveness and remain a victim. The forgiveness that I have given away or I have received has shaped who I am today, therefore becoming a part of me.