Wonderful Shincheonji Life NZ

I grew up in a Christian home - I knew God was out there, and I didn’t mind attending church on a Sunday (well, most of the time I didn’t!). But life wasn’t easy, and being a Christian certainly didn’t make me exempt from hardship (I know you can all relate!)! In fact, in my times of struggle, often I would end up being frustrated at God for not helping me or answering my prayers. I would feel at times a bit hurt, rejected or unheard by him too – and because of that I felt like I had to just fix everything myself. I really wanted to know what to do to really have God be present in my life and be that helping hand that others would share he was for them - but I didn’t know what I needed to do to achieve that. I lived my life of faith trusting that God was good and that he wanted good things for us, but the prayers, worship and encouraging sermons were not enough – I still felt like I was at six degrees of separation from God. I wanted to grow closer to Him, but the Bible seemed too hard

The topic of forgiveness is one that everyone can relate to. In this imperfect world, there is a lot of known and unknown hurt that we have all experienced and made someone else experience too. We know that holding onto the hurt in our heart towards another is not good for us, but sometimes we keep it there anyway to validate the injustice we feel. Forgiving someone is a process of letting go our feelings of hurt towards that person’s words/actions, releasing them from the hold of the injustice in our hearts. It takes understanding and maturity to do this, and it may not be easy or quick. However, we shouldn’t just think of forgiving someone as our right to do/not to do. I would like us to think what Jesus says about forgiveness to understand the true and deep reason that we must in fact work on forgiving everyone. In the words of Mt 5:38-48 Jesus said to love even one’s enemies. In Mt 6:14-15, Jesus said, “If you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also fo