Testimonies
Dear Becky and Steve,
My wife and I have been married for 23 years, we have gone to counseling on and off for some time. Both of us have taken a 2 year lay pastoral counseling program and counseled couples for years in a previous church. With that background you would think we would have a (near) perfect marriage, we don't.
Both my wife and I come from dysfunctional (Christians have called it sinful before the secular community came up with this less hurtful name) families so we had a lot to deal with.
Your seminar helped me more fully grasp the depth of forgiveness and how I was only going so far in my marriage. A couple of key elements for me were:
1. If Christ could forgive those who were about to crucify Him how could I not forgive my wife. This process was difficult for me because all my life I have held anger and hurt against people. Satan used this to stop me from forgiving and restoring our love. What I came to understand as I worked with this process was that we had forgiven each other (most of the time) and moved on eventually. Part of Satan's job was to keep us mired in unforgiveness as long as he could. Forgiving each other quicker restored our love quicker and Satan had no foothold. I found that by restoring our love with forgiveness it helped our marriage to be restored to normalcy quicker.
2. The process takes time and we needed to talk about it together. It is somewhat complicated and by us talking about it we were encouraged and wanted to keep learning the process and using it to help our marriage.
3. It wasn't long before I was using the process with others and my children. The wonderful part of working through the process with your children is that they learned part of the forgiveness concepts by seeing me work things out with them.
The forgiveness is an important piece of a complicate union called marriage. Seeing the concepts from the seminar work in our marriage and family is encouraging and makes me want to keep working on my marriage.
Regards Pat White |
