Walk Away

Last week in church, the pastor talked about forgiveness and what it does.  He started by saying that your spirit is not intended to carry bitterness.  (I like that)  He also said that you choose to forgive you don't necessarily feel like forgiving.  After choosing, you release your offender, and third you tell God that you trust Him to see you through this because forgiving is hard.   He also said, that after you forgive someone (or yourself) you can walk away.  You can draw those boundary lines and not cross over them, again.  He said that, "Forgiveness is for the present and the past."  People often feel that right after forgiving someone, you have to trust them.  He said, "Trust is for the future.  It takes time."   Forgiveness is less about the offender and more about the quality of the soul of the person doing the forgiving.  

I thought about the person I need to forgive the most, and am pretty good about doing that, letting it go, until something from the past comes up or something in my present reminds me, and I can feel that old hatred beginning to burn.  It is really hard to forgive other people.

It is harder to forgive yourself, I think, because you have to take yourself with you everywhere you go.  You can't really 'walk away' as easily.  So, how does that work?  I've been thinking about that.  How do you separate yourself from yourself?  I was reading, "Because of Winn-Dixie" to the class. It's a fifth grade book, by Kate DiCamillo.  I want to quote a passage because it helped me with the answer.  This is from pages 94-96.

     "Look at this tree," Gloria said.
     I looked up.  There were bottles hanging from just about every branch.  There were whiskey bottle and beer bottles and wine bottles all tied on with string, and some of them were clanking against each other and making a spooky kind of noise.  Me and Winn-Dixie stood and stared at the tree, and the hair on top of his head rose up a little bit and he growled deep in his throat.
     Gloria Dump pointed her cane at the tree.
     "What you think about this tree?"
     I said, "I don't know.  Why are all those bottles on it?"
     "To keep the ghosts away," Gloria said.
     "What ghosts?"
     "The ghosts of all the things I done wrong."
     I looked at all the bottles on the tree.  "You did that many things wrong?"  I asked her.
     "Mmmm-hmmm," said Gloria. "More than that."
     "But you're the nicest person I know, " I told her.
     "Don't mean I havent' done bad things," she said.
     "There's whiskey bottles on there, " I told her.
  "And beer bottles."
     "Child," said Gloria Dump, "I know that.  I'm the one who put 'em there.  I'm the one who drank what was in 'em."
     "My mama drank,"  I whispered.
     "I know it." Gloria Dump said.
     "The preacher says that sometimes she couldn't stop drinking."
     "Mmmm-hmmm,"  said Gloria again.  "That's the way it is for some folks.  We get started and we can't get stopped."
     "Are you one of those people?"
     "Yes ma'am.  I am.  But these days, I don't drink nothing stronger than coffee."
     "Did the whiskey and beer and wine, did they make you do the bad things that are ghosts now?"
     "Some of them," said Gloria Dump. "Some of them I would've done anyway, with alcohol or without it.  Before I learned."
     "Learned what?"
     "Learned what is the most important thing."
     "What's that?"  I asked her.
     "It's different for everyone," she said.  "You find out on your own.  But in the meantime, you got to remember, you can't always judge people by the things they done.  You got to judge them by what they are doing now."
    
When I read that, it was like part of the puzzle for me to understand how to better talk to my daughter.  She has a hard time forgiving, people, but mostly herself.  She has hunkered down, and burrowed herself  into a stagnant hole.  Like her bunker, only she invites the enemy in instead of battling it (The battlefield truly is the mind).  I think it is important to have a physical representation of what you're forgiving, because thoughts are so abstract. You need something more concrete.  Gloria's bottles.  It might be a letter that you write to the offender.  Stones in a jar.  Something to hold the past, I think, may help you face the past and once that's done, it's just an empty bottle,  or a stone you threw in a lake,  or a letter you burned in the fire place.  Let the past go.  After that, start judging yourself on the present.  Each day a new way.  And if you mess up, start fresh the next day.  I have written on one of my walls, "Blessed is the life that finds joy in the Journey."  I think that's how you find joy in your life's journey.  Walk away from the past.