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