You will be able to forgive others as soon as you are ready to accept forgiveness for yourself. The things we do not forgive in others are the same things we refuse to forgive in ourselves. Alternatively, as soon as you are ready to receive grace into your greatest shame, you will be able to offer the same to another. If you can be forgiven then so can I, and vice versa. Grace reaches both of us at the same time; it is the great equalizer.
When you learn to trust, I believe you will begin to trust EVERYONE. Now most of us choose who we trust, which is wise in a way, especially when you are talking about actually entrusting yourself to people. But I believe you can also learn to trust the people who have hurt you continually and will continue to do so. Trusting those who have hurt you looks like this: forgiving them and giving them over to their own devices.
When you learn to trust, it means you realize those people who have hurt ...
I wonder what the world would be like if we did not work so hard to avoid everything. So much in our lives exists to help deaden our senses: not only drugs and drink, but electronics and countless other diversions. If we really felt everything there is to feel, I wonder if we would fall apart. The world seems like it would drastically change if we just accepted and encountered the pain of our circumstances head on, as it is. But we do not. We anesthetize in order to avoid feeling too much.
If we allowed ourselves to feel the pain in the world, I believe we may move on to better things. We would have to change things. We would not be able to bear things the way they are.So much of our stress must come from this mentality of scarcity, which is borne of the belief that there is not enough. There is never enough time, money, energy, love, so we hunker down and protect what we do have. We have this irritability that springs from the belief that if we do not fiercely guard our space, time, energy and money, someone will come and take them from us. It’s true: people will take what you give them, and there is also this ...
Remember that there is a natural rhythm to life. You must work and you must rest. Too much of either of those is not a good thing. If you are constantly working and not resting, you will run yourself into the ground. And if you rest too much, you will actually make yourself more tired. Instead, it is wise to heed the adage: “work hard, play hard.” When you are working, you should give yourself to it fully, not constantly wishing for rest while you do it. And when you are resting, you ...
The paradox of being human is that you are nothing and very valuable all at the same time. It’s a little hard to understand, but if you look around, you will see that you are a very small part of a very big universe careening through time – just one very small speck in a very large nebula of actions and reactions. It’s easy to think that what you do doesn’t really matter. It’s true, it doesn’t; and yet, you are also very important. You have probably also had ...
I heard a friend say once that “works of art are never finished, only abandoned.” My art teacher in high school taught me to develop a composition moving around and across the entire image at once, sketching in parts of the whole a little at a time, rather than finishing one part in detail and then moving onto another (which may be our tendency). Life is kind of like that, too. You don’t ever really finish it. It’s just that one day you die. You might not have everything ...