Four different things travel under the one word “forgiveness”: the command to forgive, the slow work of healing, reconciliation with the person who hurt you, and the question of justice. Scripture commands the first. It sets no deadline on the second, and it does not require the third or cancel the fourth. You can make a real decision to forgive while the wound is still open, and you can keep healing long after that decision. Much of the pressure to forgive right away comes from treating all four as one.
Sheila Wise Rowe, a longtime therapist and the author of Healing Racial Trauma, spoke about this with Lisa Fields on the Jude 3 Project podcast. She kept the command and questioned the clock.
What the command to forgive actually requires
The New Testament treats forgiveness as part of following Jesus, not an optional extra for unusually gentle people. Paul writes, “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32). The model is God’s own forgiveness of us. Christians are forgiven people, and they are told to become forgiving people.
Rowe affirms this plainly. She says that “forgiveness can be just an act of obedience that Lord, you say to forgive, so I’m gonna forgive.” She also states it without hedging: “We absolutely are called to forgive.” Anyone reading her as a permission slip to skip forgiveness has misread her.
Notice where she places the act. In her words, “the initial conversation is between us and the Lord.” That detail matters more than it first appears. If forgiveness begins as a conversation with God, it is first something you bring to him, before it is ever a statement to the offender or a signal to a watching community that everything is fine. And God can receive it honestly, including an honest admission that you are not there yet.
So the first distinction is this: the command tells you the direction you are walking. It does not set a deadline for arrival.
Why healing keeps its own timeline
Healing is a process, and it takes time because a serious wound has to be understood before it can be fully released.
Rowe’s challenge to the rush is short and direct: “this rush to forgive. I wonder about that.” She grounds her reason in the character of God. “God loves us. He collects our tears as in a bottle,” she says, and she goes on to describe grief, pain and harm as things that deeply trouble God. Her conclusion follows from that premise: if God takes our pain this seriously, “what is the rush?”
She is drawing on the Psalms. The KJV reads, “Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” (Psalm 56:8). This is poetry, so it should be read as poetry. The psalm pictures attention, not a literal container. The psalmist, in fear and distress, trusts that God has noticed every tear and kept a record of it.
Rowe also points to Jesus with Mary and Martha after the death of Lazarus, noting that his response was not that they just needed to get over it. John’s account includes the shortest verse in the KJV: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). This is narrative, so it describes what Jesus did rather than issuing a rule. Read in its setting, the narrative suggests something further that Rowe does not draw out herself: earlier in the chapter Jesus tells his disciples he is going to wake Lazarus, so he seems to weep already knowing what he is about to do. If that reading holds, grief and confident faith stood side by side in him.
Scripture gives its own picture for forgiveness. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Forgiving is like cancelling a debt: you give up your claim to collect from the person who wronged you. The picture has a limit. A debt can be cancelled on paper in a moment, but the damage a person caused does not disappear when the paper is signed. You can release the claim and still be living with what the loss did to you. The command addresses the claim. Healing addresses the damage.
Grief as discovery
Taking time can also make forgiveness more real. Lisa Fields described this as “grief being a form of discovery.” She recalled a book on forgiveness whose author argued, roughly, that you can only forgive to the depth you know you were offended. At first a hurt seems to be a certain size. As you sit with it, you may find it goes deeper, or that it is attached to an older experience you never dealt with, and the person in front of you only stepped on it.
Her conclusion is precise: “if you give to forgive too soon, you actually miss the discovery portion.” She describes the work as needing to “excavate offense to see what is the root of the offense.” Fast forgiveness can release the wrong thing. You may forgive the surface offense while the older wound, the one that actually needs forgiving and healing, stays buried.
Rowe adds a guard against making this process lonely. She reminds listeners that “we’re not sitting in it alone.” She describes a prayer that many Christians assume is forbidden: “we can honestly go to God and say, I’m not ready.” She continues with a request, “Please help me to discover what’s really going on here.” And she adds, “And the Lord honors that.”
Telling God you are not ready is itself a way of bringing the wound to him. The person who prays that prayer has already put God in charge of the process.
Couldn’t “I’m still healing” become an excuse?
It could, and this is the strongest objection to everything above. Someone can say they are still processing for years while resentment quietly hardens, and the language of healing becomes a shelter for refusing the command.
Rowe gives no timeline, and neither does Scripture. What she gives is a method that leaves the delay open to examination. She describes the work as “really discerning and having people speak into that and help you to discern, is this the time to do that or not?” That suggests a practical marker. Delay that is processing stays in conversation: you are still praying about the hurt, still asking God what he wants you to do with it, and still letting at least one wise person speak into it. Delay that is avoidance goes quiet: the subject is closed in prayer, no one is allowed to ask, and the wound is guarded rather than examined.
That marker will not tell anyone how many months is too many. It does tell you whether the clock is running toward forgiveness or has stopped.
Is forgiving the same as going back to the relationship?
No. This explains why so many people dread the word. Forgiveness is something one person can do before God. It does not require the offender’s apology, cooperation or even awareness. Reconciliation is a restored relationship, and a relationship has two sides. If the person who caused the harm has not acknowledged it, has not changed, or is still dangerous, you can forgive fully and the relationship can stay closed.
Rowe makes a related point about healing within families. She does not tell people they simply need to deal with their family. Christians can pray for their families and try to work toward healing with them, she says, but sometimes it does not happen, and “in some instances, it’s not even safe.” Nothing about the command to forgive overrides that.
She also offers a careful way to think about trust. She has stopped describing any space as simply “safe,” because no place is completely safe, and speaks instead of spaces that are safe enough. She recommends entering slowly, watching how people actually treat one another and you, and judging a space by what it is rather than what you hope or fear it will be. That counsel fits anyone deciding whether to rebuild contact after harm.
If the harm you are carrying is abuse, and especially if you are still in danger, forgiveness never means returning to it. A trusted person, a counselor and, where it applies, the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 are part of the right next step.
Does forgiving mean giving up on justice?
Lisa Fields raised this as a real tension. Some people see forgiveness as weakness, she observed, and in many places “forgiveness is used to avoid accountability.” Her contrast is that forgiveness should mean “actually being a part of the accountability,” not an escape from it. She notes that people react to the misuse in opposite ways, some rejecting forgiveness entirely and others rushing it.
Scripture holds the two together. Paul writes, “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). Read in context, the verse forbids personal revenge. It does not say wrongs should go unanswered. It says the answer belongs to God. The very next chapter describes governing authorities as God’s servants who punish wrongdoing. Together, the passage separates your personal claim to pay someone back, which you release, from the proper work of justice, which continues.
So a person can forgive and still report a crime, testify, pursue a fair outcome, or ask a church to hold a leader accountable. Forgiveness hands over the role of avenger. It does not hand the offender a clean record.
The misconception that does the most damage
The most common error is to read slow, honest grief as unforgiveness. A wounded person who is not ready gets treated as spiritually behind, and a person who forgives instantly gets treated as the model.
Rowe gives an example. She recalls a high-profile case in which a police officer killed a man after going to the wrong door. The victim’s brother publicly forgave the officer. The mother said she was not ready. Rowe does not criticize the brother. Her concern is the pressure aimed at the mother, and her question is for everyone watching: “can you give space for this mom to just grieve, to let her grieve?”
Both responses can be faithful. One person may forgive quickly because God has done that work in them. Another may need far longer. Rowe’s counsel is to “seek the Lord about what is he wanting you to do right at this moment with that.” For some people, she adds, the answer is “taking the time to work through your feelings.”
Whatever pace that turns out to be, the person walking it is in good company. The psalmist trusted that God had counted every tear and written each one down. Forgiveness given at that pace is offered to a God who has already been paying attention to the whole wound, including the parts you have not found yet.