Stop making excuses for other people.
Stop making excuses for ourselves.
While it is our goal to develop compassion and achieve forgiveness, acceptance, and love, it is also our goal to accept reality and hold people accountable for their behavior. We can also hold ourselves accountable for our own behavior, and, at the same time, have compassion and understanding for ourselves.
— Melody Beattie, The Language of Letting Go, p. 260
One problem with the word work is that it has come to be equated with drudgery, and is considered degrading. Now some work is drudgery, though it is not always degrading. Vacuuming the house or scrubbing out the refrigerator is drudgery for me, though I find it in no way degrading. And that it is drudgery is lack in me. I enjoy the results and so I should enjoy producing the results. I suspect that it is not the work itself which is the problem, but that it is taking me from other work, such as whatever manuscript I am currently working on. Drudgery is not what work is meant to be. Our work should be our play. If we watch a child at play for a few minutes, “seriously” at play, we see that all his energies are concentrated on it. He is working very hard at it. And that is how the artist works, although the artist may be conscious of discipline while the child simply experiences it.
— Madeleine L’Engle, Sold Into Egypt, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 235-236
Rejoice in the abundance of being able to awaken each morning and experience a new day. Be glad to be alive, to be healthy, to have friends, to be creative, to be a living example of the joy of living. Live your highest awareness. Enjoy your transformational process.
— Louise L. Hay, You Can Heal Your Life, p. 121
Let’s make the decision to joyfully accept all situations — the lines, the traffic jams, the downed computers, and the rest — as opportunities to include God in our lives, in that moment, and then wait for the change in perception that will assuredly come.
— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 14-15
When the deepest desire we feel within our hearts is for something other than God, a spirit of entitlement develops. We see ourselves as needing something we don’t have and we believe we should have. Justice is on our side. So we think. Prayer becomes demand when desire becomes our tyrant.
Soon we’re caught in the addictive cycle. Whatever brings satisfaction relieves pain for the moment, then creates deeper emptiness that, in turn, more rudely clamors for relief. We lose our power to choose. The will becomes a slave to whatever god makes us feel better. We die as persons while Satan chuckles.
— Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, p. 86
It is important to be gentle with and accepting of yourself throughout your relationship. You are just as flawed, misguided, and hurtful as your lover, and you both need a good dose of TLC. While the idea of self-forgiveness might be a “duh” to many of you, the point still needs to be made. Self-forgiveness enables you to move on with kindness after grieving your flaws and the ways you have hurt your lover. When you forgive yourself, you look for your good qualities, appreciate the love you offer, and accept with humility the harm you cause. You also change your story to reflect your positive intention and your effort to do the best you can with what you have to work with.
Self-forgiveness is not that different from forgiving your partner. . . .
Nobody is perfect, and everybody will make many mistakes. Some of us make mistakes that cause harm, and others make mistakes that only cause a mess. Because you and your partner are human beings, you will make mistakes, fail occasionally, and sometimes even harm other people. Your need to be perfect is an unenforceable rule, one that can never be met. Needing to never hurt your lover is an unenforceable rule. Demanding that you always be successful in all aspects of your relationship is an unenforceable rule. When you accept that you are human, you are able to offer forgiveness to yourself and remember that you have the resources at your disposal to improve yourself and help others.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 209-210, 215
Can you think of any need you have that would require more strength than God exercised to raise the dead?
— Beth Moore, Praying God’s Word Day by Day, p. 253
I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing. Forgiveness says, “Yes, you have done this thing, but I accept your apology; I will never hold it against you and everything between us two will be exactly as it was before.” But excusing says “I see that you couldn’t help it or didn’t mean it; you weren’t really to blame.” If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites….
A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it [forgiveness], from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour. But that would not be forgiveness at all. Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness, and that we can always have from God if we ask for it.
— C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, edited by Patricia S. Klein, p. 263-264
But a person with a shattered life . . . doesn’t first need Christ to forgive her or to forgive through her. Before anything else, she needs Christ to cradle her, to nurse her with the milk of divine love, to hold her in his arms like an inestimable gem, to sing her songs of gentle care and firm protection, and to restore her to herself as a beloved and treasured being.
And that’s what Christ does.
— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 206
Happy women know that happiness is not the art of building a trouble-free life but rather the art of responding well when trouble strikes.
— Dan Baker, PhD, and Cathy Greenberg, PhD, What Happy Women Know, p. 236