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Grace, Healing, Free Will and Forgiveness
More and more I experience life itself and particularly my spiritual life as a work in progress. And I have seen that, when with grace I become more honest in self-awareness, I recognize that I have been trapped in repetitive loops with some of my more destructive behaviors. And it is sometimes necessary to travel backwards in memory to find the root of my compulsions.
This is not an attempt to blame past experiences or people for my behavior patterns. This is becoming free through grace to recognize broken places so that I can bring them to God for healing. Knowing I am loved unconditionally is a prerequisite for facing my brokenness. Facing it is necessary for getting healed. And getting healed is crucial for becoming free to grow and change.
I can admit to destructive frozen areas in myself without falling into despair and self-hate because I can see that I was not free to change before. But once I recognize these, I am responsible for seeking healing grace to change. Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin.
We are all imperfect and vulnerable children born into an imperfect family in an imperfect world. We all have wounds that we have covered over for protection. We have developed behavior patterns that have helped us survive, but that eventually need to be changed for us to continue growing into the people God created us to be.
We don’t choose to become victims, but we can choose to be healed and become free. If we were deeply wounded by someone, forgiving them will be part of becoming free. There simply is no way around it, however terrible the wound is and however long it takes.
I had a wonderfully warm and loving friend whose father had been an extremely abusive alcoholic. She had two brothers and three sisters. Her brothers grew up to be just like their father. Her sisters were competent practical women who married good men. My friend, Ann, was a loving, sensitive, caring woman. But she was attracted to men like her father even though she hated him and was happy when he died in a fire.
At forty Ann ended up on a respirator in an ICU. She was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis and told she would never be able to breathe without the respirator. Ann did not belong to any religion and she asked to be taken off the respirator, but her children couldn’t bring themselves to agree to this. During the night a woman came to Ann in the ICU. Ann had never seen her before and never could find her again. But this woman told Ann that God loved her and had a plan for her life. Somehow, Ann believed her. The next day Ann was able to get off the respirator and went home three days later with no symptoms of lung damage.
Ann found a small church and joined it. The minister and congregation were mostly introverted intellectuals, where Ann was a people person who responded to the world from her feelings. She quickly became the heart of the little church actively building community and motivating the parishioners to do outreach ministries. She also became involved with renewal movements within the denomination and touched even more lives.
I was blessed to be a witness to her continuing spiritual healing and growth, such as recognizing that she had unconsciously resented her older sisters and rejected their love. It was wonderful to watch as she experienced the joy of new loving and close relationships with her sisters. During the next fifteen years of her life she suffered several very serious health problems requiring surgeries and hospitalizations, finally even losing a leg because of circulatory problems. But her loving spirit continued to be an incredible inspiration to many people through all of this. She opened my eyes to my own over sensitivity, that had led me to turn my back on friends who unknowingly hurt me, when she risked telling her friends that they had hurt her so they could work through it to forgiveness and a closer relationship. But, still she struggled with her hatred for her father.
I couldn’t help wondering why God had healed Ann miraculously only to let her go through so many medical traumas. Then one day, she came to me with tears of joy and told me that while cleaning the sanctuary at church, she had finally become free to forgive her father. Not long after that, Ann had a fatal heart attack.
God kept Ann alive miraculously and used her to heal others even while she was still physically and spiritually wounded. And finally when His love had healed her spirit and freed her to forgive the one that had wounded her the most, he took her home.
Grace, healing, free will and forgiveness are inseparable.
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Compassion or No One’s Playing with a Full Deck
I was reflecting on free will this morning and came across this past blog. It lays some ground work for looking at just how free anyone’s will is. I’m re-posting it as a beginning of some posts on free will.
From when I was quite young, I stayed stressed night and day over the possibility of being scolded for anything. Unfortunately, even if a fellow student was scolded, I also hurt for them, literally. My stomach would ache.
As an adult when a friend was going through a painful divorce, it seemed almost like I was going through it myself. In many ways this made me compassionate and I tried always to relieve other’s suffering in any way I could.
But, my life became controlled by an underlying need to relieve suffering of any kind, my own, my friends’, the world’s.
This sounds like a good thing, and at times it undoubtedly was. But suffering is an inevitable part of life, everyone’s life. And a lot of suffering is self inflicted and perpetuated by attempts to escape it, rather than experience it and learn or grow from it.
Compassion and…
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Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul
The Book, Mother Teresa * Come Be My Light is a collection of her letters and her journals, which she had wanted burned when she died. Through them we see her terrible interior struggle with despair and feelings of abandonment by God.
She had mystical experiences and years of a sense of God’s presence when she was struggling to get permission and the means for the ministry she knew God was asking of her. But once she actually begins working with the poorest of the poor, she loses those, and not only feels abandoned, but sometimes even doubts the reality of God.
In her uphill battle to get permission from Church Authorities all the way up to the Pope, she harasses them incredibly, all the while saying, “I accept your authority and your decision. But could you hurry, because this is God’s call and people are being lost.” I love…
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Dear Society: It’s Us, the Siblings
Incredible insights into the life of siblings of children diagnosed with Autism.
My 7-year-old brother Nate slept over at mine and my husband’s house last Friday. We took him to his first baseball game that night, where he ate a pretzel; caught a baseball; cuddled with the stuffed animal he had brought; asked questions constantly; ate a snow cone; and watched fireworks with a dropped jaw and a sparkle in his eyes like a 7-year-old should.
I have two brothers under the age of 10. The older of the two, JD, is 9 years old and has Classic Autism. The younger of the two, Nate, (the one about whom this post is written), does not have Autism, but lives with it on a daily basis nonetheless.
The night of the baseball game, we got home around 10:30 PM. Nate and my husband played video games for a while before Nate said he was tired and wanted to go to sleep. As I was…
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Hungers of the Heart by Richard G. Watts (excerpts)
Found this worth rereading this morning.
Hungers of the heart: to find a personal reason for being here, a purpose worth living for; hunger to shed our loneliness, to have honest relationships with one another; for a society that is more peaceable and fair; and a hunger to feel at home in a cosmos that we so briefly inhabit, a hunger that many people call God.
Regarding the words Spiritual and Religious, you might think of it this way: Spirituality is personal religion and religion is social spirituality. Both words refer to the human need to find our place in the overall scheme of things.
However, in virtually every field of human endeavor, new discoveries are praised. …In no other area of life is denial of progress held up as a virtue, except religion.
Carl Sagan was right: “Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from…
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My Sister-in-Law Was a Human Cannonball or Where Do You Park Your Elephants?
- Duina Preparing for Flight
Many years ago, my husband’s father was Potentate of the Almenah Shrine Temple in Nashville, Tennessee. At some point, over sixty years ago, he initiated bringing a Shrine Circus to Nashville. Little did he know that it was also bringing a future daughter-in-law.
A high-light of the circus were the Flying Zacchinis. The Zacchinis were a circus family from Italy. They performed on the trapeze, the trampoline, and their own invention, the Flying Cannonball. Two beautiful young sisters were propelled from a giant cannon across the arena into a net. This was done with much suspense and fanfare and a loud explosive sound, as they literally came flying out. (Except once, when the sound effects failed and there was just a ‘ f-f-f-f-t‘ as they were shot out.) Sometimes they were in double cannons and shot simultaneously. One of the sisters, Duina, was…
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What I Used to Believe
Yup! Still haven’t seen the bottoms of anyone’s feet ascending yet.
I used to believe that good people were perfectly good. Or at the very least, they were headed to it, gathering speed as they aged.
Now, I know a whole lot of nice dead people who never got anywhere near perfect.
Even worse, now that I’m old, I seem to be getting less good each year, or maybe just more obviously not so great.
I’m beginning to think it’s a little like the Velveteen Rabbit story. Our pretty and soft coverings wear thin from the lessons about loving that we get from bumping up against other people.
We begin to look a lot less good or at least a more spotty good, than when we had the energy to fake it,
Freedom has its price and becoming free to be real is expensive.
But when we realize that we can see the door from here, we finally get it:
Only…
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My overachieving underachiever.
Can so relate to this. I love the sentence: I know you are not behind (at school), you’re right where you should be on your own little adventure through life! ….you make me proud and teach me to be a better Mother every single day.
You’re NOT an underachiever because academically you’re not hitting all your milestones, you’re not an underachiever because your abilities aren’t in that of maths and writing. You are an achiever, you’re my achiever! And don’t you ever let anyone tell you otherwise!
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RAINBOWS, PRIDE AND JUST LOVING MY DAUGHTER
This is a beautiful true story that takes us into a life of rich community and kindness.
poetry, photos and musings oh my!
“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.” – Loretta Young
“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” – Audrey Hepburn
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When I left my ex-husband, I took my children and moved away from a very toxic family of origin. For the first time in my life, I had some support. A young man who taught a class the previous summer provided a link that had been missing all my life. (Yes, Michael, it has been 26 years this Friday.) Michael and his partner, Cliff, became the ‘brothers’ that I had wished for as a child. Michael had lived in Sacramento before and since his ex was moving there with Michael’s son he was going to be there for him. They kept telling me…
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