Corrie Ten Boom – the famous Dutch Christian and wartime heroine – once told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven the person, but still she kept rehearsing the incident over and over in her mind and she couldn’t sleep. Finally, she cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. Corrie Ten Boom wrote: “My help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” – “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But after the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.” – “And so it proved to be” said Corrie. “There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up again in my conversations, but the force—which was my willingness [to accommodate] the matter—had gone out of them, and at the last they stopped.”