Often (and I do mean often) past unhappy experiences come to my thought and play on an endless loop in my head until I am distracted by something else, or I am able to consciously let it go for a time. Sometimes the experiences are about something someone did or said to me. More often than not, they are something I did or said to someone else.
As I was reliving another one of those unhappy occurrences recently, I realized that it kept coming back up over and over again because I had not forgiven myself for something I did that caused another to suffer greatly. Then it hit me--each time something from the past comes up, it is the same thing. Either I have not forgiven myself or someone else for something.
This was an amazing discovery for me. It showed me just how much resentment and guilt I have been carrying around with me for years (I mean some of these things go all the way back to childhood!!) So immediately, when something unhappy came to my thought, I began to think about who needed to be forgiven.
Some of them are small things--someone saying something embarrassing about me in front of others, or my behaving rudely to an employee at a store. But some seem to be so much bigger than that. And these things really test my ability to forgive. I have to work at it and am not always successful. But I guess you could say that the cool thing is that I have a perfect record of what still needs work. The perfectly preserved moment will appear on the projector in my head and begin playing the loop, until I recognize it again for what it is, and try again to forgive.
About the act of forgiving--well, I don't know how much I have to say about that. I know that forgiving myself is much, much harder than forgiving others. I can always seem to see that they were dealing with a stressful situation, or unhappy about something else, or maybe just being careless or unthinking. Who hasn't been there?
But my faults seem to loom large--too large to accept, because I know them all, or at least most of them, and they are legion (a huge number.) This reminds me of the Bible story where Jesus encountered an insane man in the tombs near the Gadarenes who said his name was legion because so many devils were inside of him. Jesus wasn't impressed and demanded that the devils leave him--which they did and entered into a herd of swine that ran over a cliff into the sea and drowned.* All at once!
This is a new idea for me. Perhaps I, too, can see these endless looping images for what they are--something that is keeping me from seeing myself as God made me to be, keeping me from being a living example of His image and likeness (see Genesis 1.) Instead of seeing myself as part of God's creation that He made and declared to be all good, I am reviewing tapes that put me and others in the role of devil or evil, behaving contrary to what God created us to be.
It says in Psalms (86:5) "thou, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee."
But what if the images keep playing because we are afraid that we will do the same thing if faced with it again. Maybe there is more work to gain a better understanding of why we behaved that way in the first place.
Sometimes (wish it were more often!) when I am faced with a sudden wave of emotion, I dig into my thinking by asking myself questions and listen to the answers that come to me until I have what I call an "a-ha!" moment. Its that sensation when something dawns on me that hadn't occurred to me before, but explains a lot.
Whenever a bad memory comes up, I try to do this. I try to remember why I behaved the way I did. What were the circumstances? Was I angry? Emotional? Tired? I ask what I might have been afraid of. Loss of something good? Loss of something I felt I needed? Often, these fears only need to be uncovered for us to realize that they are either unfounded, or something we can do something about. This work is essential to real forgiveness, because it gets into the only place that forgiveness can take place--our own thinking!
It says in the Bible (1 John 4:18), "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear." I think that we find this perfect love as we express love unconditionally--loving ourselves and loving others regardless of what we have done or what they have done. This can lead us to a whole new view of ourselves and others,-- and it can lead to forgiveness.
*(See story in Matthew chapter 8, Mark ch. 5, or Luke ch. 8)
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