On the subject of forgiveness, Total Forgiveness, by Kendall R.T. is a best-seller. The author, a former pastor of the Westminster Chapel in London, England, gives the book a perspective on forgiveness that would appeal to quite a huge readership. If read in combination with the author’s other books such as The Thorn in the Flesh, Grace, In Pursuit of His Glory, The Sensitivity of the Spirit, Total Forgiveness, and Pure Joy, a reader might just get the fullest understanding of forgiveness.

The book is based on the premise that for human beings, forgiveness is a difficult process to undergo. Luckily, Total Forgiveness gives the reader the opportunity to understand, design, and implement a forgiveness plan. Importantly, this book encourages readers to identify their personal obstacles to forgiveness. It must be highlighted that the book bases forgiveness on God’s intervention. Besides enabling the reader to learn what forgiveness is about, the book gives strategies for unearthing own physical, emotional, and spiritual capacities to forgive. The book is fortune for people who have difficulties forgiving others in that it shows the connection between freedom and harmony on one hand and forgiveness on the other.

The other widely read book on forgiveness is Free of Charge; Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace by Miroslav Volf. This book is perfect for readers on the path to or contemplating forgiveness. Like Kendall’s Total Forgiveness, this book emphasizes the integral role that God plays in the creation of a forgiving being. Through God’s charitable forgiveness, states the author, human beings are similarly expected to pardon those who wrong them.

The same philosophy is contained in Gregory Jones’ and Célestin Musekura’s Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace. With vast experiences in Rwanda’s genocide and the subsequent forgiving by Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis, Masekura works with Jones, a theologian, to give their readers the real guide to forgiveness. The authors state that the ingredients to genuine and long-term forgiveness are communal inclusion, elimination of the burden of memory, and honesty.

The book Do Yourself a Favor, Forgive: Take Control of Your Life through Forgiveness by Joyce Meyer is equally effective in delivering the message of forgiveness. Meyer treats forgiveness as a gift of freedom that a forgiver enjoys after eliminating the burden of holding onto a grudge or hatred against others. With well laid procedures for forgiveness, Meyer’s book may prompt its readers to face and resolve recurring traits that may promote merciless tendencies.

The author focuses on readers’ anger, a feeling to which most relationship breakages, sleepless nights, hypertension, and ulcers can be attributed. The book thoroughly details the important process of forgiving and its positive influences on the causes of anger, which is an element of blame. Like Free of Charge; Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace by Miroslav Volf, Meyer’s book presents forgiveness as the gateway to freedom from anger and other ill feelings associated with lack of forgiveness.