Why do we stay in a self-made prison? Why do we stay in a place that shuts out life from our souls? Why do we hold grudges? Don't we understand that the chains we hold for someone else weighs us down in the floods of grief and bitterness?
When we hold grudges, we see the pain inflicted on us as the larger debt and our own as the smaller. We don't see how much we ourselves have done, how much we need forgiveness. We just see the the junk in someone else's backyard and completely miss our own. We choose not to have the perspective on them we need to be able to forgive. We can also take the hate we hold as part of our identity. Without it, who would we be? Perhaps we have lived with it so long, we forget that hate doesn't belong inside of us. We start thinking the prison is reality, that the walls will always be there and that anywhere outside of them is dangerous and unsafe.
By holding grudges and judgement, by looking down on another person, we play the exchange game. We place ourselves in the judgement lineup without fully realizing we are next in line. The handcuffs we cast always have two locks- one for them, one for ourselves. Hating rents the fabric of our very humanity. It doesn't necessarily rent the fabric of the one despized, but it ALWAYS rents the fabric of the one who hates- it is a tearing apart of our very souls. Not only does it tear us apart but having such hate inside of us spills over into the ones we love and tears them apart as well. Hate is not content to stay inside one person. As it grows, as it festers, so does its appetite. It drives families and friends apart. It drives away those we most want to keep and we don't realize what we've done, what we've lost, until it's too late.
Deciding to take a look at yourself and step beyond the walls is a very scary thing to do. You're accepting that the pain you've known, what you have thought of as reality is not reality. You are accepting there is something more, something you can't controll. You have to come face to face with the darker side of yourself and accept yourself just as you are before you can accept the darkness and goodness inside of everybody else. Only by releasing our need to be in the right, will we realize the good, the rightness, in the other.
Life is too short to look down an another. Life is too fleeting to hold a grudge. Life is just too short not to know FREEDOM. Life is too precious to throw it away and that is exactly what you do when you place yourself over another. Do you know how much energy it takes to judge another? Do you realize how much joy it saps from the relationships around you? Do you realize how much hate is costing you every day? If you did, you would no longer look down on them. I guarantee it.
Why are you still here? Take up your mat and walk! There is a grace paradigm just waiting to welcome you.
365-09 #327Labels: 365-09 Challenge, Forgiveness, God