It is hard to picture becoming a more forgiving person without having hurts to forgive. Do we think that you can build up muscles for lifting weights by just going to the gym and regarding them? Can staring at the piano, even a white Steinway, negate the need for our fingers pressing the keys ten thousand times? 

There was a comment that cost me three years of friendship. It took less than ten seconds to utter, but I clung to it like a dead fish, repeating it over and over and over to myself when I could have been walking through a field, or listening to the birds, or cleaning my bathroom. Hey, anything would have been a smarter use of months and mental juice than regurgitating a string of words that were gone before the sky had time to change. But I hung on to them, giving them the power they did not deserve to keep me stuck in resentment. 

Pathetic. 

In His mercy, God arranged for me to finally reroute, like the capillaries that find a way around a blocked artery. The person I was mad at, was determined to stay frozen to, needed me. In an uncharacteristically compassionate moment I realized that yes, I could step up, even without an apology. 

In actually spending time together, the brief interaction of a moment years expired seemed, well, irrelevant.

Then the horizon of our relationship had space enough to change.