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‘Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven."’ ~Matthew 18:21
Ah, forgiveness. I know it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s routinely the hardest thing I find myself having to do on any given day. We like to be right, but forgiveness usually means we take at least a little bit of ownership in the situation. In forgiving my grandmother for her alcoholism, I had to own that I was often unfairly angry with her. I was too young to understand that she was self-medicating a mental health condition. So, in owning my anger I then had to forgive myself. And that might be the hardest part. Letting ourselves off the hook can be incredibly difficult. We tend to hold ourselves to a much higher standard than we hold others around us to. That’s too bad. Spirit loves us all absolutely and unconditionally. So we have to make the decision to forgive. And it’s a decision we all deserve. You see, it’s because unforgiveness gets in the way. It gets in the way of our relationships with one another, with ourselves, and especially with Spirit. I really feel Spirit wants us to forgive so we can clear the conduit of our relationships. We are each an expression of that Holy One. If we can’t forgive we muddy Spirit’s ability to come through. What a loss that is for all of us! We’re each a little less when one of us can’t be at our fullest expression of Spirit because of unforgiveness. It’s tough work, forgiving. Sometimes it feels impossible. Oftentimes we have to do it again and again. That’s ok. It’s worth every effort because we are so much lighter on the other side of that work. So, punch a pillow, have a good cry, sit with a Practitioner, call your therapist, but keep working at forgiveness. It’s a decision we all deserve.
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We are Cause! I practically jumped up and down last Sunday trying to get this point across. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I did actually jump up and down at one point. We are Cause and what we see happening in our lives are the effects. The material world is an effect. It’s REAL. Don’t get me wrong! We have to deal with it. We shouldn’t say it isn’t real. That’s spiritual bypass. But understanding that the majority of what we see happening in our lives is an effect of our own thoughts is vitally important and incredibly powerful. It means that we can change our thoughts - change the cause - and get new effects whenever we want.
Now, there are bad things that happen in life. There are folks out there that argue our thoughts, conscious or otherwise, create EVERYTHING in our lives. I’m not one of those folks. No, I don’t believe you thought your way to childhood abuse, or that bad accident, or a myriad of other things people like to throw up as situations when we talk about our thoughts creating the effects in our lives. But we always have control of ourselves. Always. We can always control our actions and reactions even when we can’t control the situation because others are involved. So, in that way we can still be the cause that creates new effects in our lives. We are incredibly powerful. The more tuned in we are to our thoughts, the more powerful we are. It’s as simple and sometimes as difficult as that. So, remember, you are Cause, and you are powerful! Nothing and no one can take that away from you! You can only give it away. When I ask what is the opposite of love I generally hear hate or fear. But I believe love has no spiritual opposite. Nothing is as powerful as love. Nothing has the depth that love has. Nothing has the capacity to change everything it touches the way love does. While negative things get greater press and seem to be more powerful in our modern world, I truly believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe.
Now, love can be hard to talk about because we don’t have an opposite to compare it to. We think of romantic, mushy stuff. But that’s not what I’m talking about at all. In Buddhism I’ve heard them speak of having a strong back and a soft front. That’s the love I’m talking about. That’s something that accepts and even cradles, but can also push back. It takes all our anger and bile and vitriol and welcomes us anyway. That’s love. The God of Love. We learn to look for love outside of ourselves. It gets us in trouble, of course. It’s why there are so many songs and poems written about love. Our greatest source of that Holy Love, though, that love with the strong back and soft front, the love with no spiritual opposite, is found within. The God of Love (no, not Cupid) is waiting for us within, waiting for us to acknowledge our immense strength and expression of Divine Love. It’s a choice we make. Just like we choose our thoughts, we choose to act from that center of Holy Love. It can be a hard choice to make, certainly, especially in a world that doesn’t appear to have a lot of love in it. That’s just an illusion though. There’s an awful lot of Holy Love walking around inside each of us. We just have to choose it first. We are incredibly powerful. When we understand we can choose our thoughts and we can choose to love first, we change ourselves and change the world around us. Those aren’t just pretty words. That’s the Truth. I see it happen every day. What do you want to choose today? This moment? Right now? Love has no opposite. Choose to be powerful. |
Rev. StephaniLiving by the affirmation, "Everything I want is chasing me!" Archives
July 2022
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