Ever been offended?

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Next time you are offended, take these four action steps:

1. Acknowledge to yourself that you were offended. There’s no sense pretending. It hurts to be offended. You can’t transcend what you don’t acknowledge.
2. Remind yourself that being offended is a choice. You don’t have to be offended. One of the things that makes you uniquely human is you have a choice, how you can respond to what happens to you.
3. Remember that you are dead to these things. If you are a Christian, St. Paul says, “you are dead and your life is hid with Christ in God” (see Colossians 3:3). You don’t have to obsesses about these things and let them consume your thinking.
4. Forgive the other person and let it go. This is literally what the Greek word apoluo. It means: “to set free, to release, to pardon a prisoner or release a debtor.” As someone once said, “holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

Effective leaders have learned to overlook offenses. They are mindful of Solomon’s admonition: “The discretion of a man makes him slow to anger, and his glory is to overlook a transgression.” (Proverbs 19:11)