Dean Letfus
// Director & Founder of the Forgiveness GuyDEAN LETFUS is Director and Founder of the Forgiveness Guy online community, based in Tavua, Fiji. He pioneered an online outreach based on forgiveness to provide people with faith, hope, and love to seek love and forgiveness in their daily lives, and to provide resources in the future that will support them on their journey. Dean is also a Property Developer involved in Marketing Research for his companies Turnkey Property Investments and Massive Action. He mentors and supports other property investors to be able to build a passive income stream that would enable them to give away more than they could earn.
Websites: www.deanletfus.com and www.facebook.com/forgivenessfans
Photo: Dean Letfus
Interview:
Our pathway is often changed by one significant event and in my three decades of watching people struggle with life’s curve balls, I have seen decisions to stay hurt, bitter, and resentful destroy more lives than any other thing. Unforgiveness should carry a “Highly Dangerous!” warning label. What starts as a justified hurt and need to forgive turns into bitterness and hatred, often ending in mental illness and even suicide. Even physical ailments such as asthma and arthritis can have their roots in unforgiveness. I watched an older woman completely healed of arthritis in front of my eyes when she finally forgave her sister whom she had hated for sixty years!
I have found music and specifically worship to be a place where we can learn to be “willing to be made willing” to forgive those who have wounded us. It is difficult to sing of our freedom and victory in Jesus when we are in an emotional prison of our own doing. In fact many of us live with a cognitive dissonance where we love God and even though God says we cannot love Him if we hate our brother, we somehow manage it.
I remember as a teenager working as a DJ in a nightclub in New Zealand, in the era of bands like KISS, Michael Jackson, and Earth Wind and Fire. I would sometimes play “I was made for loving you” by KISS, and almost every time a fight would break out in the club. Even as a pre-Christian, I discovered that music could control and influence people’s emotions and even behaviour. There was a terrible plane crash in the early 1980’s called the Erebus disaster. I would play “After the love is gone” by Earth Wind and Fire, and dedicate it to the Erebus families, and could get an entire nightclub to burst into tears. I cite these examples simply to illustrate that music has power, significant power to affect our souls and our spirits. So listening to and singing real truth helps us deal with our need for justice and come to a place to extend mercy to those who need forgiving.
The most important thing by far to be understood about forgiveness is this: we need to forgive because unforgiveness puts us in a prison. The object of our resentment often has no idea they have hurt us and can even be dead. But the cancer continues until we forgive. So forgiving is 100% about setting us free, and is entirely unrelated to the offenders attitude or repentance.
“We need to forgive because unforgiveness puts us in a prison.”
– Dean Letfus, Director & Founder of the Forgiveness Guy
