How Do We Forive If We Can't Forget?

Everyone tells us that we need to forgive those that have hurt us. We esspecially need to forgive those that ask for it. I am recently finding it very hard. When appologies seem fake, and those people never change its hard for me to accept and forgive them. I honestly don't want to. This shows me that right now my heart is in the wrong place. I am not following what the Lord has commanded of me and that is wrong. This weekend a wound that I thought was closed, re-opened and I had a difficult time dealing with it. Myself and a good friend of mine sat in the sanctuary and prayed for a long while. We both need the healing of the Lord. I have tried to go about all of this by myself and fix my heart and heal the hurt, when I needed to give it to God in the first place. I will be the first to say that I do not understand why God asks us to forgive, when it hurts so much to even think about. God has a plan, and He knows what we need. It is said that in order for us to actually move on, and grow closer with God we must forgive.

The person that hurt me is always in my life. They never leave no matter how many times I beg. I want them out of my life so that I can heal, but the Lord is using this to show me that everything is done His way and not the way that I want it to. God wants me to forgive this person, while they are still in my life, and I must do so. This person is in my life providing constant reminder of the hurt that I wish I could just forget. I consider it unfair, but that is my worldy views talking through me. I have not let God enter the situation like I thought that I did, and that is where I went wrong. This situation will never go away until  turn it all over to God and stop trying to do everything by myself. At this point in time I do not feel that I am in the place where I alone can forgive and I know that I will never forget, but it is a learning process that we all must go through in different ways. We will never understand what the Lord is doing in our lives, but we can learn to follow the path that He has set for us.