Last Sunday we had a guest speaker at our church who spoke about forgiveness. Okay, big deal, you say. Like that hasn’t been preached about before.

Then he pulled out stats like this:

[Everett] Worthington, who is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and a pioneer in forgiveness research, has found that people who won’t forgive the wrongs committed against them tend to have negative indicators of health and well-being: more stress-related disorders, lower immune-system function, and worse rates of cardiovascular disease than the population as a whole. In effect, by failing to forgive they punish themselves. Unforgiving people are also thought to experience higher rates of divorce, which also reduces well-being, given that married men and women consistently do better on most health barometers, including longevity.

In contrast people who forgive, Worthington finds, may have better health, fewer episodes of clinical depression, longer marriages and better “social support,” another indicator of well-being. This latter means forgiving people get along better with others, who in turn come to their aid in social-support situations.

“Forgiveness research,” as this field is called, is pretty interesting. Yet it deals with something so obvious that we sometimes miss the meat of its message.

I’ve heard the slogan “Never Forgive, Never Forget” tossed around on some blogs, and it’s a saying I dare not adopt, no matter how good my intentions may be to the contrary. It’s not easy to do, of course, this forgiving thing, but it’s worth more than the constant pain of an unforgiving mindset.