{"id":291450,"date":"2007-02-11T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-11T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/i-learned-to-forgive\/"},"modified":"2024-05-13T20:39:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-13T18:39:19","slug":"i-learned-to-forgive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/i-learned-to-forgive\/","title":{"rendered":"I learned to forgive"},"content":{"rendered":"

G. and I had been married for 17 years and had four children when I felt her attitude toward me change dramatically. She was often out of the house because of her job as a social worker for a government program that took care of abandoned children. After a few months, I found out that she was having an affair with one of her colleagues. It was a terrible blow<\/strong>: I saw our whole relationship fall to pieces, my family, my life. I felt betrayed, my pride was deeply wounded and I was desperate in seeing everything that I had built over the years go to ruin. After a while, my wife decided to abandon our family. One day, while I was at work, she came home to get her things and she got into a fight with our oldest daughters who were then 15 and 17 years old. I had no other alternative but to give in to her decision, even though it caused us a lot of suffering. I prayed and implored God, saying: \u201cHelp me! Give me the strength and the grace to overcome everything!\u201d<\/strong> I had absolute faith in his love. It was not easy. I had even asked my sister to help me and she had encouraged me to reflect on how much Jesus had not merited the suffering that he had to go through: he had been betrayed from men, and had suffered humiliation and cried the Father\u2019s abandonment. Recognizing and loving Him in this deep suffering, I kept on my feet day after day, and I made a real and total choice of God. In fixing my thoughts and heart on God<\/strong>, my suffering found meaning; and my initial feelings of hate were being replaced by sentiments of mercy. I had finally made it to forgive my wife. Together with other people with whom I used to shared the christian commitment, I found the strength to go ahead. Constantly embracing Jesus forsaken <\/a>helped me, even in the separation that I lived with, to remain faithful to the commitment that I had taken on with the sacrament of matrimony, and so to also live chastity. After a year of being separated<\/strong>, day by day the spirituality of unity <\/a>brought greater light in my life with the children and I was thus able to follow them in their various experiences as they grew. In order to have more time with them, I left my job as an engineer in my company which took so much of my day, and I began a small business. I made this choice, even if the previous job was well-paid. I knew that our economic resources would reduce, but I went ahead without fearing this change. Looking back now on what God has worked in me and in my children, we are deeply grateful to him. (V. T. \u2013 Brazil)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The discovery of the wife’s betrayal, the loss of trust, suffering, and finally finding hope again. Witness of an engineer, who chooses to start again, finds a new job in order to be closer to his children<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-291450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-focolare-worldwide-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.focolare.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}