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People in general would rather die than forgive. It's THAT hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.
Sue Monk Kidd
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Forgiveness can be incredibly difficult for many people, often seen as harder than facing death.

This quote by Sue Monk Kidd highlights the intensity of human emotions and the struggle with forgiveness. It suggests that for many, the burden of resentment and the challenge of letting go can feel overwhelming, to the point that they might prefer extreme measures rather than facing the discomfort of forgiving someone who has wronged them. The comparison to life and death underscores the profound impact that holding onto grudges can have on our lives.

Themes

ForgivenessResentmentEmotionsStruggleRelationship

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the challenges of letting go of past grievances during a support group meeting.

More from Sue Monk Kidd

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
Sue Monk KiddRead
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
Sue Monk KiddRead
I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
Sue Monk KiddRead

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