Some of the deepest healing can come in our lives when we learn to forgive God. Let me explain. God never has and never will wrong us. However, a lot of the difficulties, disappointments, and other junk we face in the world gets blamed on Him. We may not blame Him for the negative thing happening, knowing it’s from the enemy, but we may blame Him for letting it happen or for not fixing it when and how we would have liked Him to. 

Releasing forgiveness to God is not for Him to be pardoned of something, it's for us to let go of our hurt, our offense that we are holding over His head that blocks our ability to relate to Him. 

When I was a teenager, my family adopted two boys. What started as something we thought was done in obedience to God, turned into a situation that brought a lot of difficulty and brokenness, and really shook my family to the core. A lot has changed since then, but I’ve continued to question God deep in my heart: “Why did you lead us to do something that only hurt us?” “Why didn’t you heal my brothers and change our situation when we were so desperate?” 

My healing came during a prayer meeting focused on forgiveness. I had to recognize and release the hurts I was holding on to that I was directing toward God so that I could forgive Him and restore relationship with Him in that area.  

I think it can be quite easy to pick up hurts like these on the field. We wonder why God would lead us somewhere where we feel like all we’ve done is sacrifice and we haven’t seen any fruit. We blame God when something happens to our family while we are walking in obedience to Him. We question why God would send us to people who only want to reject Him. We get discouraged by sickness and visa problems that we know God could miraculously fix any moment. If we don’t continually release forgiveness and release the offenses we have picked up with God, we will become bitter, hard, and burnt out. The process of recognizing these hurts and forgiving can be painful, but leaving the walls between us and God can be even more painful.