Week 4: Forgiveness (Part 1)

Hey, Compassion Collective week four coming at ya! This week is about forgiveness.

Week one, compassion, week two patience, week three gratitude, and week four forgiveness. Oh, wait a trip up—it’s also going to be week five! There’s a two-part series on forgiveness because it’s such a big honkin’ problem for ourselves and for others, so we’re going to break it up into two and the first one is going to be forgive yourself. Love Yourself, be kind to yourself, forgive yourself.

Forgiveness—back to the glasses and let’s talk about the definition—the action or process of forgiving or being forgiven. Pardon, absolution, exoneration, remission, clemency, mercy, amnesty.

All right—forgiveness.

Why is it so hard to forgive ourselves? I think in some cases were more lenient on others and a lot less lenient on ourselves. I’ll share my story with you. I made some BAD choices in my life and a lot of them and repetitive bad choices and I really never looked at forgiving myself. I mean, there are times when I have flashbacks of things that I’ve done and decisions that I made and it wasn’t until, for me, my unique journey was going to confession after 26 years and hearing the priest absolve me of all my sins, the ones I could recollect. And some of them were mortal guys, I mean, I was, you know, living for this world and um, came out of there, oh my gosh, floating! By the way, there are two other videos that you can watch. I’m not going to dive into confession on this one and I’m not going to dive into the Eucharist, but here are the two different videos that you guys can go to that will dive into those topics, but we’re not going to do that here. This is about forgiveness.

So again, I never really sat down and talked or thought about forgiving myself, but I was haunted by some of the things that I did until after confession, when the priest absolve me of all my sins. And then I start hearing on radio stations and homilies and throughout the scriptures that God expects us to forgive and that means forgive ourselves. So that’s why I’m breaking it into two because I think we’re harder on ourselves and I believe we need to forgive ourselves before we can forgive others. We need to love ourselves before we can love and forgive others. So it was after my confession, after a little while on my journey, when I finally understood that, OK, I forgive myself. If God is going to forgive me, I’m going to forgive me.

So let’s work on that this week. What is it that you’re not letting go that you did?

Maybe confession is the answer. Maybe just talking to someone, admitting it and fessing up to whatever it was that you did to that person. Apologizing—that’s half the battle. There are some families that don’t talk to each other for decades because one is too stubborn to apologize. And I’ve even heard in cases that they don’t even really remember what they were fighting about it to begin with—How crazy is that?

So if it’s your family, your brother, your husband, your wife, your dog, or what or who are you mad at right now, and just forgive them. Forgiving means letting go. It doesn’t mean forget, go back and be best buddies with that person. If someone did you super wrong and you’re just better off without them, that’s fine, but you can still let go. Don’t harbor that hate. Don’t harbor those bad feelings. Pray for them, wish great things for them. You must have learned—something must have happened out of that experience that was a good thing. That’s the gratitude section last week, right? What are you looking for in your life, good and bad, be grateful for all of it.

And maybe that person deserves that forgiveness and that weight off of their shoulders as well. Something to think about. Let’s hear about what YOU guys have to say. I’ll pop off something if I got something that comes into my life that I think is quite aligned with this forgiveness topic or any of the other ones that I’ve had throughout the weeks. Because it should be a constant weave throughout your life, all of these different ways of looking at life, you’ll start to put things together and you’ll start to look at your whole life with all of these components, and that’s where the richness comes from!

OK, I’m going to let you go. Thank you again for your time and have a blessed day. See, next time, the next one—remember part two—forgiveness. Bye!