Forgiving Others When the Wound Feels Too Deep to Heal Now

Forgiving others gets talked about a lot easier than it gets lived, and David L. Savage, founder of The Savage Path Ministries Corp., knows it. On a recent episode of Wrestling with the Inner Man, he asked his longtime friend and returning guest Dr. Aaron Thomas, senior pastor at Northwoods Baptist Church, a question most hosts would avoid: how do you practice Christian forgiveness when the wound is this specific, this horrific, and still this fresh?

What followed was not a tidy answer about Christian forgiveness. It was a man describing two years of wrestling with God before he found peace, and a story so raw it changes how you think about forgiving others altogether.

What Do You Do When Forgiving Someone Who Hurt You Feels Impossible?

David went off script. He asked Dr. Thomas about his daughter's car accident, the one where she was pregnant with twins and lost one of them. He asked if Dr. Thomas knew where the driver responsible was living.

Dr. Thomas admitted he did know. He described sitting on his couch, telling his wife he wanted to hurt the man himself. He said it plainly, without softening it for the camera.

This is forgiving someone who hurt you at its most unfiltered, not a Sunday school illustration. This is a grandfather grieving a grandchild he never got to hold, a man who knew exactly where the driver lived and admitted, out loud, that he wanted revenge.

The police had declared it a vehicular homicide. They never pursued it. And Dr. Thomas carried that unresolved weight for two full years.

Forgiving someone who hurt you does not arrive on command, and this episode never pretends it does. Dr. Thomas said God kept asking him one question through all of it: what would you do if you were the one standing in front of judgment?

Sit with that question yourself today before you try to answer it for anyone else.

If you want to hear this story in David's own words alongside the full conversation, explore it here in the podcast library.

How Do You Start Letting Go Of Bitterness Has Built Up for Years?

Letting go of bitterness required Dr. Thomas to look somewhere he did not expect: his own past. He told David he had broken all ten commandments in his own words. He had sold drugs. He had done, in his phrase, "all kinds of dirt."

And still, God loved him. God chose to love him and chose to forgive him, long before Dr. Thomas had cleaned anything up.

Then he went further back. He named the men and women who abused him as a child, from age three to thirteen, and said he once wanted to knock on a door in Philadelphia and tell his abusers that Jesus loved them anyway.

Letting go of bitterness, for Dr. Thomas, was never about pretending the harm was small. It was about remembering that his own forgiveness was never small either.

He quoted a line that stuck with him: unforgiveness becomes a prison where bitterness is the jailer, resentment is the chain, and anger is the cell. Letting go of bitterness starts with recognizing you are the one locked inside that cell, not the person who hurt you.

Name one specific bitterness you are still carrying today, and bring just that one thing to God before you do anything else with it.

Do you feel like you need to hear David's own story first, then read more here about his journey to The Savage Path.

Why Does Overcoming Bitterness and Resentment Require Staying Close to God?

Overcoming bitterness and resentment, David and Dr. Thomas agreed, is not something you manufacture through sheer discipline. Dr. Thomas pointed to Jesus telling the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2 that they had lost their first love. Sound doctrine and hard work had not been enough to keep their hearts warm toward people.

Overcoming bitterness and resentment starts with proximity, not effort. Dr. Thomas said the more he remembers how patient God has been with him, the easier it becomes to extend that same patience to someone else.

It is not a technique. It is a relationship that keeps producing something you could not produce on your own.

David tied it back to the Beauty and the Beast picture from earlier in the conversation: the Beast is not loved because he becomes handsome, he becomes different because he is loved first. Overcoming bitterness and resentment works the same way.

You do not forgive your way into feeling close to God. You get close to God, and Christian forgiveness starts showing up as evidence that it happened.

Spend ten unhurried minutes with God today, with no agenda except being near Him, and let forgiveness be a byproduct instead of the goal.

What Three Truths Help You Practice Christian Forgiveness and Overcome the Prison of Unforgiveness?

Near the end of the episode, Dr. Thomas offered three truths for anyone stuck in the prison of unforgiveness.

This Struggle Doesn't Belong to One Town, It Belongs to Every Man Carrying It

Whatever specific wound you are carrying tonight, whether it happened in a car accident on a highway you drive every day or in a home no one else ever saw inside of, you are not the only man wrestling with it. Grief this particular does not stay contained to one region, and neither does the temptation toward revenge that follows it. A father in a completely different state is asking God that same question tonight: what would you do if you were the one standing in front of judgment?

That question, and the answer this episode wrestles toward, reaches men everywhere this show is heard, not just the town where it was recorded.

When Forgiveness Finally Feels Possible

Dr. Thomas never claimed Christian forgiveness was easy or instant. He described two years of struggle before he found peace, and a level of honesty about his own past that most men never risk saying out loud.

What changed him was not effort. It was remembering how much he himself had already been forgiven, and letting that memory reshape how he forgives others.

Start with a short assessment built for exactly this kind of struggle, and take the next step here when you are ready.

You are welcome to connect here as well if this story stirred up a wound you have been carrying alone.

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