CLEAR ALL
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
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Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.
Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment.
Finally I saw that everything had come to nothing. and gave it up. and took my old body and went out into the morning and sang.
10
A bird was lying on his back in the road with his feet in the air. A horse saw him and asked, “What’re you doing?” The sparrow said, “I’m helping hold back the darkness.” The horse sneered and said, “Yeah, right,” and the sparrow said, “One does what one can.”
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We must not confuse letting go of past injuries with feeling an obligation to let the injurers back into our life. The freedom of forgiveness often includes a firm boundary and loving distance from those who have harmed us.
The miracle is that your children will love you with all your imperfections if you can do the same for them.
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When forgiveness experts talk in binary language (’You either forgive the wrongdoer or you are a prisoner of your own anger and hate’), they are collapsing the messy complexity of human emotions into a simplistic dichotomous equation.
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People’s sense of self-worth is pivotal to their ability to look clearly at the hurt they’ve caused. The more solid one’s sense of self regard, the more likely that that person can feel empathy and compassion for the hurt party, and apologize from an authentic center.
Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world.