Embracing the silence

This morning everything is quiet.  For the first time since my husband's death, my mind is not racing. There is still much to do but everything that had to be done "immediately" is done....I am embracing the quiet and sharing my gratitude with God. Through the love and support of family and friends, I am feeling God's love everywhere and am empowered to face all the challenges that lie ahead.   I finally can catch my breath.

My faith in God is strong and I embrace life.  Somehow through all of this, I hope that God can use me to bring others closer to him.  Everything in life is about choices.  God loves us so much, He allows us the freedom to choose Him.  When I chose Him, and then finally gave myself back to the One who gave me life, that is the moment when I became truly free---which seems a contradiction in terms if you look at the circumstances of my life.

Recently I wrote in an email to a friend the following except.  Today I can not express what I am feeling any better.  Hopefully, sharing my experience will make a positive difference in your life

For months I have been mourning the loss of my marriage even though Jon was still alive

..and then one day the mourning for the most part stopped.....

Then Jon died....I think I have felt almost every emotion that I can feel (if that is possible) in a week.

Then this morning, I realized that I had my life back...no that isn't even right....

This morning for the first time in my life I realized that God gave me life and I understand what an incredible gift that is...

And I feel His presence everywhere...

And that presence is manifested in compassion 

If I would die tonight, what I am feeling right now would make everything in my life okay because it brought me right here, right now and it is positively wonderful

I can not express in words how grateful I am....how in awe I am...how humble I feel.....

Humility is what happens when you finally let God 100% into your heart and are overwhelmed by His love and realize that all you felt was a gentle touch.   

we all have a choice

It's hard these days for me to think about anything other than the challenges at hand...but reading the words of others helps....today I read the following and I choose joy....

Monday January 30, 2012

Choosing Joy

Joy is what makes life worth living, but for many joy seems hard to find. They complain that their lives are sorrowful and depressing. What then brings the joy we so much desire? Are some people just lucky, while others have run out of luck? Strange as it may sound, we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it.

What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

Healing Our Memories

From someone who knows, who thought they could never forgive and absolutely never forget a portion of my memories...with God's grace, my heart is filled with compassion and not only is forgiveness healing my life but my memories too...guess it is no coincident that for the last three days the meditations sent from the Henry Nouwen Society was exactly what I needed to hear....embrace forgiveness and your life will turn around!


Sunday January 29, 2012       

Healing Our Memories

Forgiving does not mean forgetting. When we forgive a person, the memory of the wound might stay with us for a long time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as a visible sign. But forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing. When we forgive our parents for their divorce, our children for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in crisis, our doctors for their ill advice, we no longer have to experience ourselves as the victims of events we had no control over.

Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let these events destroy us; it enables them to become events that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed heals memories.

Forgiveness

Last year I began a project to write every single day for a year about my spiritual journey....after over 200 posts  my husband accessed this blog and felt so threatened by what I had to say that I deleted all the entries to keep peace in the house...I knew that my husband was an alcoholic and I also knew that I was suffering from verbal abuse but I wrote everyday anyway knowing that one day my writing would have to end if he ever found out....

I was sincere and candid when I wrote...honest feelings and struggles as I tried to grow into a strong relationship with God in spite of the abuse and the deteriorating conditions of my physical life....what I did was an exercise of faith and I began to at least become spiritually free and truly feel the love of God.

Ten days ago my husband died....Thursday, He was buried....He is in God's hands and now I will begin the journey again.....My only regret is that whiskey was the center of his life and there is no more time for him to experience joy and love and God's grace on this earth ....but I still can and so can my kids and everyone who is reading this blog can, if they choose too.

I believe that a healthy part of mourning is finding the ability to forgive....actually the healthy part of living with love through whatever life throws at you is the ability to forgive.... the last two days I have been thinking about
forgiveness and then I read some wise words by Henri Nouwen who seems to describe it best....

Today I will close this post with what he had to say:

Friday January 27, 2012      

Healing Our Hearts Through Forgiveness

How can we forgive those who do not want to be forgiven? Our deepest desire is that the forgiveness we offer will be received. This mutuality between giving and receiving is what creates peace and harmony. But if our condition for giving forgiveness is that it will be received, we seldom will forgive! Forgiving the other is first and foremost an inner movement. It is an act that removes anger, bitterness, and the desire for revenge from our hearts and helps us to reclaim our human dignity. We cannot force those we want to forgive into accepting our forgiveness. They might not be able or willing do so. They may not even know or feel that they have wounded us.

The only people we can really change are ourselves. Forgiving others is first and foremost healing our own hearts.

Saturday January 28, 2012    

Forgiving in the Name of God
We are all wounded people. Who wounds us? Often those whom we love and those who love us. When we feel rejected, abandoned, abused, manipulated, or violated, it is mostly by people very close to us: our parents, our friends, our spouses, our lovers, our children, our neighbors, our teachers, our pastors. Those who love us wound us too. That's the tragedy of our lives. This is what makes forgiveness from the heart so difficult. It is precisely our hearts that are wounded. We cry out, "You, who I expected to be there for me, you have abandoned me. How can I ever forgive you for that?"

Forgiveness often seems impossible, but nothing is impossible for God. The God who lives within us will give us the grace to go beyond our wounded selves and say, "In the Name of God you are forgiven." Let's pray for that grace.



May God Bless You....Paulletta