The Stories of Our Lives

Gratitude, Healing, Joy, Life 0

However God may choose to evaluate our lives, whatever memory of our past we shall have in heaven, we know this:  It will only contribute to our joy.  We will read our story by the light of redemption and see how God has used both the good and the bad, the sorrow and the gladness for our welfare and his glory.  With the assurance of total forgiveness we will be free to know ourselves fully, walking again through the seasons of life to linger over the cherished moments and stand in awe at God’s grace for the moments we have tried so hard to forget.  Our gratitude and awe will swell into worship of a Lover so strong and kind as to make us fully his own.

— Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 190-191

Forgiveness and Illness

Forgiveness, Healing, Letting Go 0

We all have opinions on who was right and who was wrong according to our own perceptions, and we can all find ways to justify our feelings.  We want to punish others for what they did to us; however, we are the ones running the story over and over in our own minds.  It is foolish for us to punish ourselves in the present because someone hurt us in the past.

To release the past, we want to be willing to forgive, even if we don’t know how.  Forgiveness means giving up our hurtful feelings and just letting the whole thing go.  A state of nonforgiveness actually destroys something within ourselves.

No matter what avenue of spirituality you follow you will usually find that forgiveness is an enormous issue at any time, but most particularly when there is an illness.  When we are ill we really need to look around and see who it is we need to forgive.  And usually the very person who we think we will never forgive is the one we need to forgive the most.  Not forgiving someone else doesn’t harm the person in the slightest, but it plays havoc with us.  The issues aren’t theirs; the issues are ours.

The grudges and hurts you feel have to do with forgiving yourself, not someone else.  Affirm that you are totally willing to forgive everyone.  “I am willing to free myself from the past.  I am willing to forgive all those who may have ever harmed me and I forgive myself for having harmed others.”  If you think of anyone who may have harmed you in any way at any point in your life, bless that person with love and release him or her, then dismiss the thought….

If you feel ripped-off by another, know that nobody can take anything from you that is rightfully yours.  If it belongs to you, it will return to you at the right time.  If something doesn’t come back to you, it wasn’t meant to.  You need to accept it and go on with your life.

— Louise L. Hay, The Power Is Within You, p. 89-91

Forgiveness Is a Journey.

Forgiveness, Growth, Healing 0

Forgiveness about injuries this deep does not come easily or quickly.  There can’t always be a moment of forgiveness, when suddenly our lives are transformed.  We are human.  We need time to process our experiences, to mourn, to separate, to grow.  Forgiveness brews within us, expedited according to our own creative capacities, impeded by our conflicts, a mysterious product of the human spirit.  The reclamation of love and of the forgiving self is an arduous and profound journey.

— Robert Karen, PhD, The Forgiving Self, p. 60

God’s Loving Embrace

God, Healing, Trials 0

The gospel calls us continually to make Christ the source, the center, and the purpose of our lives.  In him we find our home.  In the safety of that place, our sadnesses can point us to God, even drive us into God’s loving embrace.  Here mourning our losses ultimately lets us claim our belovedness.  Mourning opens us to a future we could not imagine on our own — one that includes a dance.

— Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning Into Dancing, p. 37

The Power of Story

Healing, Story 0

I have discovered the power of story to change people.  I have seen a story heal shame and free people from fear, ease suffering and restore a lost sense of worth.  I have learned that the ways we can befriend and strengthen the life in one another are very simple and very old.  Stories have not lost their power to heal over generations.  Stories need no footnotes.

— Ruth Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom, p. xxii

The Irrationality of Defining Others

Healing, Relationships, Truth 0

If someone defines you, even in subtle ways, they are pretending to know the unknowable.  There is a quality of fantasy to their words and sometimes to their actions.  Even so, they are usually unaware of the fact that they are playing “let’s pretend.”  They fool themselves and sometimes others into thinking that what they are saying is true or that what they are doing is right.

When people “make up” your reality — as if they were you — they are trying to control you, even when they don’t realize it.

When people attempt to control you they begin by pretending.  When they define you they are acting in a senseless way.  They are pretending. . . .

We know that they are pretending because in actual fact, no one can tell what you want, believe, should do, or why you have done what you have done.  No one can know your inner reality, your intentions, your motives, what you think, believe, feel, like, dislike, what you know, how you do what you do, or who you are.  If someone does pretend to know your inner reality: “You’re trying to start a fight,” they have it backwards. People can only know themselves.  It doesn’t work the other way around.

Since only you can define yourself, your self-definition is yours.  It isn’t necessary to prove it or explain it.  It is, after all, your own.  Self-definition is inherent in being a person.

Despite the evidence, it is difficult for many people to realize that the person who defines them is not being rational.  They feel inclined to defend themselves as if the person defining them were rational.  But by trying to defend themselves against someone’s definitions, they are acknowledging those definitions as valid, that they make sense, when they are, in fact, complete nonsense….

Millions of people try to defend themselves from abuse and describe the altercations as arguments.  Are they?  I think not.  I see them more as a struggle to retain one’s own reality when someone else has stepped into it.

— Patricia Evans, Controlling People, p. 58-59

[Photo: South Riding, Virginia, May 3, 2014]

The Best Remedy

Healing 0

The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom.  Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth.

— Dorothy L. Sayers, quoted by Kit Bakke, in Miss Alcott’s E-mail, p. 206

Mourning to Dancing

Gratitude, Healing, Life 0

If God is found in our hard times, then all of life, no matter how apparently insignificant or difficult, can open us to God’s work among us.  To be grateful does not mean repressing our remembered hurts.  But as we come to God with our hurts — honestly, not superficially — something life changing can begin slowly to happen.  We discover how God is the One who invites us to healing.  We realize that any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step….

The mystery of the dance is that its movements are discovered in the mourning.  To heal is to let the Holy Spirit call me to dance, to believe again, even amid my pain, that God will orchestrate and guide my life.

We tend, however, to divide our past into good things to remember with gratitude and painful things to accept or forget.  This way of thinking, which at first glance seems quite natural, prevents us from allowing our whole past to be the source from which we live our future.  It locks us into a self-involved focus on our gain or comfort.  It becomes a way to categorize, and in a way, control.  Such an outlook becomes another attempt to avoid facing our suffering.  Once we accept this division, we develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be glad about than things to be resentful about, more things to celebrate than to complain about.

Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully.  And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy.  We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens….

If mourning and dancing are part of the same movement of grace, we can be grateful for every moment we have lived.  We can claim our unique journey as God’s way to mold our hearts to greater conformity to Christ.  The cross, the primary symbol of our faith, invites us to see grace where there is pain; to see resurrection where there is death.  The call to be grateful is a call to trust that every moment can be claimed as the way of the cross that leads to new life….

I am gradually learning that the call to gratitude asks us to say, “Everything is grace.”  As long as we remain resentful about things we wish had not happened, about relationships that we wish had turned out differently, mistakes we wish we had not made, part of our heart remains isolated, unable to bear fruit in the new life ahead of us.  It is a way we hold part of ourselves apart from God.

Henri Nouwen, Turn My Mourning Into Dancing:  Finding Hope in Hard Times, p. 16-19