To retaliate against hatred with hatred is to imitate evil instead of good. It is to escalate the hatred. Hold forgiveness; let grudges go.

Forgiveness heals hurts. Revenge extends them. It takes courage to behave better than the people who hurt you. To ignore the nudge from your conscience and refuse to budge from your grudge, isn’t sanity. A grudge is a life-disturber.

Grudges are like ghosts. They are invisible ideas that people allow to haunt them. When grudges get going they release a floodgate of hatred. To let a grudge get a grip on your mind is to allow anger to rip off your inner peace. To hold a grudge is to give someone you don’t like power over your life.

Grudges are the bars in the fence that entraps your mind in focusing on people’s bad behaviors. A grudge makes you the only judge and jury.

The more your grudges the greater will be your pain. Forgiveness brings freedom from your emotional strain.

Revenge keeps anger swinging back and forth on the hinge of hatred. Hatred is the absence of love. It’s overcome by spreading love, not by withholding love.

Reverse retaliation is powerful. Get back at evil back with good. If you want to retaliate, use kindness. Jesus teaches us: “Do good to those who hurt you.”

Defensiveness sees people as dangerous. Kindness sees them with compassion. Humble people seldom hate.

Retaliation focuses your enemy’s anger. Kindness confuses and distracts him.

To be glad
Remember the good
Done to you
And forget the bad.

For help in forgiving think about this: The Bible works within the people who read it with an open, humble heart and changes them from the inside out.