Takeaways from the Gray Table — A Book Review of Lysa Terkeurst’s “Forgiving What You Can’t Forget”
There is no shortage of self-help books. So much so that it’s easy to get lost in a sea of cliches, repurposed messages, or oversimplified ideas in trying to find help or inspiration to navigate one’s struggles. It’s fair to say that the effectiveness of self-help books is debatable, as is the case in picking out what’s worth reading from piles of new releases and hyped best-sellers.
Along came Forgiving What You Can’t Forget. We can all agree that the title might be a bit cliche-ish, but there is something to be had from reading New York Times bestselling author Lysa Terkeurst’s recent work.
At its core, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget talks about healing from past traumas and re-discovering the beauty of relationships through forgiveness. It underpins what may already be a rehashed message with the author’s personal discoveries and insights through her journey towards healing from childhood sexual abuse and her husband’s extramarital affair.
The author welcomes her readers to the gray table: emblematic of the wooden table where she penned the book and where she and her friends would often gather to process unforgiven things from their pasts that are affecting their lives in the present, and takes her readers through the messy process of uncovering and untangling the ties of bitterness, resentment, and other unresolved feelings in the path towards forgiveness.
“However this translates within the context of your pain, those pictures, those memories, those times of togetherness…If they were a joy to you, they are yours to keep.
Other memories that are excruciatingly painful are yours to release.
And those that are a tangle of both are yours to sort out into piles of keep and toss. It is necessary for you not to let pain rewrite your memories. And it’s absolutely necessary not to let pain ruin your future.”
The power of the book emerges from its empathic dissection of trauma and loss. Lysa Terkeurst exquisitely translates the emotional conflict associated with these experiences in typeface, often with a distinctive penchant for metaphorical exposition.
While the author’s writing style generally makes for a beautiful read, her tendency for verbosity also somewhat impairs her book. The intentionality is there. But to the unforgiving reader, the string of alliterations particularly in parts that could be pivotal may be too much to bear. Her message is empowering enough as it is, sans waxing poetic.
“Peace is the evidence of a life of forgiveness.
It’s not that the people all around you are peaceful, or that all your relationships are perfectly peaceful all the time. Rather, it’s having a deep-down knowing that you’ve released yourself from the blinding effects of the constricting force of unforgiveness and the constraining feelings of unfairness.
You’ve traded all that drama for an upgrade.
Peace.
Living in the comfort of peace is so much better than living in the constraints of unforgiveness.”
Overall, Forgiving What You Can’t Forget is a self-help book that’s actually worthy of reading. It is sensitive in exploring the struggles associated with unforgiven things and honest in its intentions not to idealize the healing process it conveys. If you’re hungry for fresh insights on healing and forgiveness, invite yourself to the gray table — there are good things here.
