Whatever you call it, repentance is not about beating up on yourself; it’s about turning from old ways that don’t work, old habits that don’t work. Turning and turning, like a flower turning in the direction of the sun. First, we turn.
— Michael Curry, The Power of Love, p. 29-30
Photo: Bull Run Regional Park, Virginia, April 8, 2019
Positive intention is a central concept in my forgiveness process, and I will teach you to find your positive intention. Positive intention is an unparalleled way to reconnect with your big dreams. Positive intention also helps us to resist depression when a small dream is stifled. It reminds us of our deepest hopes and allows us to mourn our losses.
I have a hypothesis that one of the things we find most difficult about hurts is how we lose sight of our positive intention. When someone is hurt they focus their attention on their pain. They create grievance stories and tell them to others. By doing this, we lose sight of the big picture and of the goals we have for our life. I see time and again that when hurt people reconnect with their noblest goals they gain an immediate burst of power. Finding your positive intention reconnects you with your goals. The sad truth is, your grievances separated you from your most positive goals through your excessive focus on what went wrong.
Connecting to your positive intention is the quickest and most direct way to change your grievance story.
— Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. 141-142
Photo: Centreville, Virginia, April 12, 2013
If anything, loss is not meant to ruin us or our sleep for the rest of our lives. It simply prepares us to lose better the next time, to go into life over and over again, knowing full well that this phase, too, will end so that we can take our own unbounded enthusiasm into the next part of coming to wholeness. Whatever that may be.
— Joan Chittister, Between the Dark and the Daylight, p. 105
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 10, 2017
A victim is one who often feels helpless to respond to painful circumstances or to control thoughts and feelings. A hero has worked hard to overcome adversity and refuses to be beaten by difficult life events. Forgiveness is the journey of moving from telling the story as a victim to telling the story as a hero. Forgiveness means that your story changes so that you and not the grievance are in control.
— Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. 138
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 20, 2019
First, God is not angry at us for our sin. While sin is a serious thing, God is not concerned about sin simply because it is sin. That is, God doesn’t tell us to stay away from sin because sin offends, hurts, or angers Him. Purely from God’s perspective, sin just isn’t that big of a deal. The reason God is concerned about sin and wants all humans to stop sinning, is not because God Himself is offended or angered by sin, but because we humans are hurt and damaged by it. Sin is an issue with God, not because it hurts Him, but because it hurts us. God loves us so much, He tells us not to sin because He doesn’t want to see us get hurt by it. When God says “Don’t” what He is really saying is “Don’t hurt yourself.”
This leads to the second truth about sin to keep in mind: God does not punish us for our sin. Yes, we may get punished for sin, but this punishment is not from God. Sin carries its own punishment. In fact, the punishment that comes from sin is the pain of sin that God wants to rescue and deliver us from. God doesn’t punish us for sin; He works to rescue us from the punishment of sin. God loves us, and doesn’t want us to experience the devastating and destructive consequences of sin, and so He warns us against sin.
— J. D. Myers, Nothing But the Blood of Jesus, p. 54-55
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, February 6, 2019
The more you take things personally, the more you suffer. You observe it, hold it up to the light, release it, and move on. One can choose to let suffering be the elevator to a heightened place of humble loving. You adjust the knot on the red string around your wrist and find your center again.
Humility returns the center of gravity to the center. It addresses the ego clinging, which supplies oxygen to our suffering. It calls for a light grasp. For the opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing. This is the goal of the practice of humility. That having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.
— Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 105-106
Photo:Â South Riding, Virginia, January 13, 2019
There’s power in love. There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can. There’s power in love to lift up and liberate when nothing else will. There’s power in love to show us the way to live.
— Michael Curry, The Power of Love, p. 8
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 6, 2018
We all clamor for praise and recoil at blame. They are oddly and equally seductive. They pull us away from our center, and yet we strangely have grown dependent on blame and praise. Instead, we have to find our way to notice and return. Notice the positive sheen of praise and still refuse to cling to it. Choose to move quickly back to the center. Let the pang of this blame wash over you, abide in it, and then return immediately to your center. We want the “bliss of blamelessness,” as the Buddha would say, and yet find ourselves attaching to the praise of the crowd or the surly comment of the disgruntled. We try and gently catch ourselves when we’re about to let resentment harden into blame and let the illusion of praise define who we are.
— Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 104
Photo:Â South Riding, Virginia, October 24, 2018
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I want to make clear that taking responsibility for how you feel does not mean that what happened is your fault. You did not cause your parents to hurt you or your lover to cheat on you. You did not cause the car to hit you or the illness to strike you. You did not cause your boss to be grouchy nor did you cause the weather to stink on your vacation. While you did not cause these things to happen, you are responsible for how you think, behave, and feel since those experiences occurred. It is your life, and they are your reactions and emotions to manage.
Taking responsibility means first and foremost that even though we are hurt, we continue to make the effort to appreciate the good in our life. When we understand that pain is a normal part of life, we make the effort to keep our hurts in perspective. I challenge the common tendency to feel that our experience of hurt is more real than our ability to feel good. I challenge the tendency to assert that painful experiences are somehow deeper than rapture over the beauty of a sunset or the love we feel for our children.
Many of us are renting more space to rehashing our grievances than focusing on gratitude, love, or appreciation of nature. My central message here is when you bring more positive experiences into your life, your hurts will diminish in importance. In fact, this is the first step to taking responsibility for how you feel and beginning to forgive. If I rent out more and more space in my mind to appreciating my children or the loveliness of a rainy day, there is as a result less space and time for dwelling on the hurts.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. 111-112
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 21, 2018
The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control.
— Anne Lamott, Almost Everything, p. 45