This is an open letter to myself. Looking back upon a sore and sorry experience of hurting another, and of therefore hurting myself, I’m pleased to say I’ve learned something utterly sincere about my nature—something that I treasure now; something very “me.” I did this wrong thing, and yet still there was room for recovery. That’s grace—bliss-filled, united-in-joy, wholly-satisfying grace.
Relief? Peace? A little of the Jewish Shalom, perhaps? What shall we say is the meaning implicit in carrying forgiveness to its logical, albeit arduous, conclusion? We followed a process, and as processes are—certainly of this kind, it was individually-marked and characterised with the intrinsic learning of self-discovery, even though previously we might not have even believed in the concept of “self-discovery.” We’re happy to be converts.
In acceptance and self-acceptance we found the journey to ourselves, through our world and back to ourselves again, to be thoroughly worthwhile for a range of reasons. We disembarked and embarked again, happy to postpone the voyage long enough to take in the invigorating views.
And those views taught us something in the process of the journey to self-forgiveness. They showed us it wasn’t entirely our fault; and if God would not hold it against us, why should we? The vision of spiritual congruence through acceptance was a sight to behold—the whole life journey contingent on this, and worth it!
And life as we’d never quite known it then started. We began to truly breathe, released to fly high upon the transcendent clouds of the soul.
Looking back now, the worlds of pain and the panicked indigestion of stunted self-forgiveness held us back, but now no longer. Enduring the pain of change, embracing it with courage, was a hundred times worth it with plenty of spare change to go with it!
© S. J. Wickham, 2009.
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