My husband and I have been watching the BBC series “Father Brown.” I have been struck with the many scenes about confession and forgiveness. Father Brown makes completely clear that there is no forgiveness if there is not true regret and a desire to change. That is the view for the person who needs forgiveness. There is also the side of the injured. What is forgiveness from that point of view?
Forgiveness can be a difficult thing. If someone has hurt us badly we can have so many different emotions…anger, pain, hurt, disappointment, betrayal and others. Our emotions may swing from one feeling to another. Forgiveness may be the last thing we think about. Maybe we don’t even want to forgive for to do that we would have to let it all go.
The important thing to remember about forgiveness is that it is not just for the person who hurt us but for us as well. All the emotions that we are feeling heighten our body in a flight or fight mode. We secrete extra adrenaline causing our body to prepare for danger. When we think about the hurt we drag up those emotions again and again. You can feel the upheaval. If we continue to hang on to the hurt and drag it around with us it damages our well being. Somehow we have to find a way to let it go.
Letting it go may take time and conscious effort. Some of the hurts I have encountered in my life have hung on for quite a while. We have to consciously decide to turn it loose…. and do it again and again until those feelings subside. When we can remember the hurt without the emotions attached then we have truly let it go. There may always be a small residue like ashes left after burning paper but the real pain has subsided.
Forgiveness takes work.
We have weathered Irma and are more or less back to normal. Our son, daughter-in-law and kids have been with us for two days since they still had no power. They left tonight and it is nice to feel back to normal.
We need to relearn patience….the ability to let things resolve in their own time. Life doesn’t run on our schedule. We cannot expect instant gratification.
When families lived together this was not the case. The elderly were respected for their wisdom. Those of us who have lived for a while do have insights that we never saw when we were young. Sometimes our vision is based on past experiences and is given to help someone not make the same mistakes. Someone once said that history is to remind us of what didn’t work.
Many of us are finding ways to help by volunteering where our skills are needed and appreciated. I hope this trend continues.
Today we are just sitting here with rain and wind. So far we still have power. We also have a generator for back up. We are just slightly off the coast of Savannah with more islands and lots of marsh between us and the barrier islands. Our tides can be 8-9 feet normally and is any surge hits us at low tide it will be meaningless. The kind of surge projected at this time for us would barely come up over our river wall and onto a small dip before it would reach our lawn. Odds are we will see some wind with things blown about but hopefully not falling trees. I hope we got those out last year.
I have been thinking about some of the reasons that people are leaving churches. Just as with most things the reasons are varied. I wonder if some trend can be drawn from the whole, We have blamed at lot of it on the business of families with both parents working and that is one cog in the wheel. Parents have little time to spend with their children and (hopefully) use the weekend to do that. Many young un-marrieds have said that they find the members of churches do not live out what they espouse and are therefore hypocritical, Of course there are those who feel that the progress of science has made God less believable. All of these things are possible. So what is it about church that is important and why does it help?
The last few days have been very strange. We have spent most of our time watching the path of hurricane Irma and preparing to leave. The Governor of Georgia declared a mandatory evacuation of Savannah. We were supposed to begin leaving this morning. However, the storm has moved so far west compared to its original projection that we are unlikely to get more than some wind and rain. So we are still here. The house is covered with storm shutters and feels very strange. As of today nothing is open where we are but most of the people we know have chosen to stay. We are not fools and have left several times for storms but essentially we would be driving west where the storm will be over land and still have high winds and rain. It just doesn’t seem logical to go toward the storm. Unless something changes we will stay. There will be some storm surge of water but we are not in an area for that to reach us.
With the world the way that it is I can imagining this sort of scenario. It is not a good feeling. Each one of us needs to do everything that we can to seek peace in the world. The sad part is that it seems to be religion dividing us. Religion being mandated by the most extreme factions. Sometimes I just want to cry over the hatred. I am learning to be more outspoken about following love. I suspect that I try to tamp down heated opinions but I feel called to step beg for love and compassion no matter what.
Tonight I am discombobulated. A great southern term. Since we live in coastal Georgia we will begin putting things away and battening down the hatches. I know that we are blessed to not be in Florida or some of the islands that will be very hard hit and I grieve for those people. To have your life disrupted by mother nature can be a devastating blow. Any idea of safety and security is literally blown away. Suddenly you are completely vulnerable. Having been through this last year……as did all the places being hit again…..you start to feel caught in some dreadful nightmare. It would be easy to ask where is my God in all of this?
So where is God? The answer is right where God has always been…at our side through any kind of adversity. There was no promise that life would be perfect. Just a promise to always be there. So..I will leave my home and hope that when I return things will not be too bad. My husband and I will still be together and the rest of our family safe. As Julian of Norwich says: “and all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”
Next week may be an interesting one for me. At the moment it looks like hurricane Irma will make landfall right across my home. If it does this will be two hurricanes in two years. One of my friends said that if we are hit again she is just going to put up a for sale sign in her front yard and pray that someone is not afraid to live there.
The devastation this hurricane will leave behind in places like Haiti that have no infrastructure will be horrible. They are being pounded with 185 mile an hour winds which is the highest winds only reported one other time in recorded history. There will be many deaths, loss of homes, food, medicine and much more. In the last ten years Haiti has been hit by two earthquakes and several hurricanes. Please pray for them and the others who have been and will be in the path of this storm.
I do believe that this is true. In a previous blog I talked about the hole that is in us that we need to fill. Each of us tries to fill it in some way. Our way of filling it may be a recognizable addiction or one that society sees as good.
worry-less-journey 