The Promise of Hope: Forgiveness

Hi, I’m Edward Grinnan, editor-in-chief of Guideposts, and author of the new Guideposts book, “The Promise of Hope”, how true stories of hope and inspiration saved my life, and how they can transform yours. 

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Chapter 6 deals with forgiveness. Forgiveness is the spiritual antidote to wrongful deeds. We need to forgive. 

We need to be forgiven. Without forgiveness, we can’t move on in life. And yet, forgiveness is often not just the most difficult thing to grant, to give people, it’s also sometimes the most difficult thing to accept, and particularly when we talk about about self-forgiveness. 

We’re all called upon to forgive tremendous wrongs that have been done to us, sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally, sometimes by the very people and communities we love. One of the most powerful stories I ever worked on was with Jeanne White. I don’t know if you remember her, but her son was Ryan White, and we all remember Ryan. 

Ryan White was a little boy from Kokomo, Indiana who was struck down with the terrible disease of AIDS very early in the epidemic, when so many people just simply didn’t understand what AIDS was, how it affected people, how you could catch it. And if you remember the story, Ryan was ostracized by his community. Literally, he and his mom were driven out of their little hometown. 

And it was one of the most painful betrayals that Jeanna White ever experienced, because she grew up in Kokomo, Indiana. She planned to spend her rest of her life there. She was a third generation citizen of Kokomo. So when her town rejected her, she simply was almost beyond the point of being able to forgive them. But it was her little boy Ryan, really, and his incredibly generous and forgiving spirit that taught her how she needed– she would need to forgive Kokomo if she were ever going to move on to his inevitable death. 

I took a plane out to Indianapolis and drove out to Jeanne White’s new hometown and spent the day talking to her. And it was one of the most incredible experiences that I’ve ever had. I mean, this woman, with her faith, and her resilience, and her ability to move beyond the tragedy of her son’s death, and the tragedy that he faced, and the rejection from his own hometown was really informative, and it got me thinking about a lot of things. 

But one thing that got me thinking about was what would it be like to lose your little boy if you were a mother? And what I thought about is if I really wanted to know the answer to that question, I only have to ask my own mom. I lost a brother when I was nine years old. 

Bobby was 12. He had Down syndrome. So that made him a very special child. And it made my relationship with him very, very special. 

I grew up thinking I was there to protect him and to look out for him. And one day, Bobby disappeared, and no one knew what happened to him for the better part of two months. And when they found his body on that spring day, they never really were able to say what happened to him. 

And for years and years, I carried that burden of not knowing and thinking somehow it was my fault, and somehow my father would rather have seen me disappear than my brother, which was a crazy thing to think. Yet to a little boy, there was a kind of sad logic to it. Ultimately, in my own change journey and my own spiritual growth, I had to figure out how to forgive myself of this imagined sin and how to accept what had happened. 

So that’s what this chapter really is about. And it may sound a little sad, but it really isn’t. It was one of the most uplifting experiences of my life to reach that point, to really look at myself and be able to let go of all the guilt, and be able to accept myself for who I was and forgive myself, and forgive my family and those around me, and use that forgiveness to move on with my life. 

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You can order my book by going to Guidepost.org/promiseofhope. Check back next week when I’ll share another inspiring Guidepost story from the next chapter of “The Promise of Hope”. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about my own story as well. See you then.