One of the most popular classic product marketing legends centers on 5 letters that incredibly turbo-charged sales.

By printing these six letters on the product label, sales had a significant and recurring boost.

It was a was a win-win situation.  The company’s products flew off the shelves.  Consumers used the product more, experienced more effective results, and felt better about it.

What were these incredible 5 letters?

R-E-P-E-A-T

That’s it!  Simply by placing that one word at the end of instructions on shampoo bottles, sales increased!  Customers actually lathered…rinsed…and Repeated!  By going through a second shampoo cycle a customer’s hair was cleaner & shinier (and now more prone to be in need of conditioner, but that’s another story!).

Now “cleanliness is next to godliness”, right?

Well, it sure can be if you apply it to something everyone struggles with all the time: Forgiveness is one aspect of Christian living which is *universally* understood.

We *all* understand that we should be more forgiving.  We *all* have many opportunities to flex that forgiveness muscle too.  But how hard it is!!

Here’s one way of looking at forgiveness that might help shift your perspective and eliminate the inertia keeping you from approaching this subject in your own life.

One tendancy is to look at forgiveness as an act.  An event.  Something that you must do action-wise and then it’s over.   But Martin Luther King Jr. had a different way of looking at it:

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act…it is an attitude”

Martin Luther King Jr.

If you look at it from the perspective as a continuous state (as in hapiness, sadness, etc), things change.  Jesus himself spoke about forgiveness not as a finite event, but a process when his own disciples asked him about this part of life that is so hard to do sometimes:

“Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times.”

Matthew 18.21-22

This is where the product marketing folks at Proctor & Gamble are spot-on.  And what’s more, this can be applied to cleaning up relationships and a producing a clean heart too!   They understand that the cleansing process is something that needs to be done more than once and repeated often if you’re to get rid of all that oily, dirty grime no matter how little or how much there is in that your beautiful heart of yours.  “Repeat if necessary,” Repeat if desired.  Use DAILY”  — these instructions can also point to how forgiveness should be practiced.

If you understand this paradigm shift properly, what you are doing when you forgive someone is not forgetting the pain and wrongness that was experienced.  What you are really doing is committing to releasing the other person from the oily, dirty grime in your heart the next time you encounter them again and again and again.  And you’ll repeat if necessary until that beautiful clean heart shines through!

If this proposed shift doesn’t do it for you, here’s two other suggestions for why you should reach down deep to  deal with the people in your life that need your forgiveness:

• The first is a recent message by Pastor Tim Lucas at LiquidChurch.com on being “Bound by Bitterness“.  Pastor Tim looks at the bitter roots holding us captive.  A great perspective on how to get to a break through on this.
• The other is a very straightforward, snippety reason that just might do the trick for you:

QUESTION: Do you think that looking at forgiveness as a process, not an event changes things? Please share your thoughts, struggles or suggestions for how else to look at this tough issue we all face.