forgiveness

There area several factors that contribute to why it is so hard to forgive. One is that we associate forgiveness with forgetting... we use the phrase forgive and forget, we even say sometimes that forgiving IS forgetting. However, God never told us that forgiving is forgetting, and He doesn\'t ask us to forget as He knows it is literally impossible to... He created us that way.
Another reason it is so hard to forgive is because the person you are forgiving might not necessarily be asking for forgiveness, or they might not even think that they did anything wrong. It is so hard to go beyond yourself and forgive someone anyway.
We all have memories. Mannerisms and moments bring them back to us. Sometimes our memories of someone are aweful and we remember how we were wronged all over again. In those moments it is very important to forgive again. This is for our own sakes, so we don\'t build up a wall of bitterness within ourselves which hurts our relationship with the person we can\'t forgive, then stems out and hurts other people connected to you or them in a certain way, and most importantly hurts your relationship with our all-loving God who harbors no bitterness and wants the same for us.