Let it take its course

By: Rodrigo Angeles

Forgiveness is earned, forgiveness is grace, forgiveness is progress, and it is complicated. Everyone has experienced conflict and at the end of conflict there is forgiveness and reconciliation. In the life of Phoenix Wilson, he like everyone else has experienced conflict within their short lives, the example being Phoenix, he has struggled to forgive his uncle for running over his dog

On September 11, Phoenix started this day like any other person waking up from his slumber and going to eat breakfast and continued on to walk to school and hang out with his classmates and socialize. What was supposed to be his routine walk back home was shattered when he noticed his dog was missing and after communicating with his mother about what happened he put up missing dog posters and went around asking for assistance from his neighbors and nearby family. After a couple of days his uncle found his dog but this wasn’t good news, you see Phoenix’s uncle found the dog under his car after he had ran over it. Phoenix was devastated and overwhelmed by the death of his dog.

This all happened when phoenix was 7 years old and with time and some seaching within himself he was able to forgive his uncle even though it took him 5 years to do so.

Phoenix said, “I took me a while to forgive him the last time I saw him I was about 12 years old and the last thing I said to him was ‘I love you’”

Phoenix also made sure that he wasn’t pressured or influenced into forgiving sayin

“The year before I forgave him, my mom initially told me ‘Phoenix you gotta move on, you gotta let Rocky rest in peace and you gotta forgive your uncle’ When I was 11 this was just madness I couldn’t forgive him he ran over my dog Rocky.”

As you can see Phoenix let no one decide when he forgave his uncle not even his mother could make him waver and all this comulated into a conflict being resolved with both sides leaving with no hard feelings. Luckly Phoenix has since acquired a cat that he named Dot who has since brought him happiness

According to the article Reconciliation forgiving can carry some dangers for example

“Most obvious is that a demand for instant forgiveness and reconciliation, and a blaming of victims who cannot bring themselves simply to forget the evils done to them, can lead to the hasty covering up of severe trauma in a society, leaving the underlying ills unaddressed.

Again in Reconciliation they tell us about how the social norms have affected the concept of forgiveness, an example being people seeing forgiveness as an instant process when in reality forgiveness is dependent on how deeply the event affect the victim. Even in religeons forgiveness especially prevelant examples being repentence in Chritianity, Teshuva in Judaism, and Salem in Islam just to name a few. Another example being, some religons using reconciliation instead of asking for forgiveness and admitting that they were in the wrong

“Connected with this is the tendency, sometimes, of churches and religious actors, as well as those who most benefit from systems of exploitation, to treat reconciliation as an alternative to the liberation of victims of oppression, imposing a sense of guilt on them if they persist in their quest for justice rather than reconciling themselves to an unjust status quo.

Conflict will be ever present in the world but so will resolutions. One must remember that forgiveness is dependent upon the person and that one must not get pressured into letting it go if they feel like the conflict is still ongoing or unresolved. Letting go only to be remineded of the unresolved pain can become a common terrible occurrence. So please let nature run its course and let a conflict go to resolution.