To forgive and forget? I think not...

I was writing to a friend today when a thought crossed my mind that I felt compelled to share. Since I was a child I've heard people say, "Forgive and forget", we should forgive and forget the wrongs done to us. I'm considerably older now, (and I hope wiser than as a child), and I just can't help seeing the fallacy of this "ignoracio elenchi". We are wronged- we can forgive, but how do we forget?


I offer this to you- we shouldn't forget the wrongs done to us, nor the wrongs we do. But we should forgive and seek forgiveness for those wrongs. After that, the wrong should be treated like a corpse, a dead thing, that is buried and gone. That forgiven wrong isn't something to be brought up at a later date to be used in an argument, just as we wouldn't dig up a corpse when we recall a memory of them, rather it remains buried. We don't forget the dead one, but we don't dig them up for any reason what-so-ever...


How neat would it be if we treated wrongs this way? Instead of holding on to them, or bringing them up in anger during an argument, we leave them buried, forgiven but not forgotten, so we can learn from them and be relationally better in the future. Leaving them buried, but remembered, gives us a resource to be better people, because we remember and can learn from our mistakes... Food for thought...