Rosalind had been put in charge of the women’s outreach work that year, and she had a great yearning in her soul that the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s power would be experienced in her life and ministry endeavors. While they traveled along she bowed her head and cried to God to fill her with His Spirit. As she did, she sensed the Lord speaking to her in her heart: “Write to _____ [the one toward whom she felt hatred and unforgiveness], and ask forgiveness for the way you have treated him.”

Not a few Christians find it very difficult to forgive, especially when they’ve been deeply wronged and hurt. Rosalind Goforth was an outstanding missionary to China with her husband Jonathan for forty-seven years (1888-1934). In her autobiography Climbing, Memories of a Missionary’s Wife she wrote honestly of her own struggle and eventual victory in this difficult matter of forgiving a marked offense.

Rosalind did not reveal the specific offense that was committed against her husband and her by a fellow missionary at the station where they were ministering. “Suffice it to say,” she later wrote, “that those who knew the facts agree that humanly speaking one can scarcely imagine a case where unforgiveness was more justified. Yet my dear husband, who had equal reason with myself for feeling as I did, quietly and calmly laid it all before the Lord and left it there. He begged me to do the same, but I could not, or rather would not, forgive.”

For more than a year the person who had caused the offense continued to live at their mission station, during which time Rosalind would neither speak to nor acknowledge him. After he left the station, another three years passed in which Rosalind held the matter “more or less in abeyance.”

Then the Goforths and some other Christians traveled by train to a large religious fair in a distant town where they carried out an intensive annual evangelistic campaign.

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