Love and Weariness and Forgiveness

I wonder if that is how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night? (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner)

It sometimes seems funny to me how often my life circles back to this theme of forgiveness.   Forgiveness can be the very hardest thing I take on in a day...or week... or year.  Forgive, forgive, forgive, and then again, forgive.

Sometimes, I wish forgiveness was always like that quote above -one day you just wake up and voila!  Forgiveness happened and I didn't even notice.  It is like that sometimes.

For me, mostly, it is not.  Sometimes even after forgiveness, there is pain -the hurt of the injury, the hurt of wishing for something that can never be, the pain of dealing with the scars and ripple effects.

Or the pain of watching those same people make those same mistakes over and over again -maybe with me, maybe with others.  I am weary from the simple repetition.

Yet, I am so grateful for the healing that has transformed my life so significantly.  I look back sometimes and can hardly believe the weight from all that anger and fear that I carried with me ALL THE TIME.

The greatest flower of forgiveness that I have witnessed is freedom.  I still remember (probably because it only happened about two years ago) the very moment when I really and truly realized that My Life is Now My Own and I can do anything at all with it I choose without reference to anyone I do not want in it -simply because I could finally release all the pain and fear through forgiveness.

The Love of God poured through me and I understood in a way I never could before that my life was no accident, no mistake, that I am LOVED and cherished and that my entire purpose for being is to show that same love to all I encounter.  We are ALL loved that way.  In our ugliness, hate, destruction, violence, and all the inhuman things we humans do to each other, sometimes without any thought at all... we are loved, cherished, forgiven.

Those of us that really understand that are called to the highest purpose of all -spreading that news.