SUNDAY CITAR

"I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."

~ Maya Angelou ~

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All I can say after that is WOW! What she said really resonated with me. I have done A LOT of things in my life that I am not proud of. I still to this day struggle with forgiving myself for those things. I know that I have disappointed and hurt a lot of people over the years who are very close to me and that makes it hard for me to forgive and, of course, I'll never forget.

Having a lot of 'free time', lots of VERY QUIET time on my hands lends itself to thinking and thinking and thinking. When you have that much time to think, it is not always good. I know the Lord has forgiven me and I have placed these things at His feet a million and one times but I am continuously going back to pick them up again.

Why do we do that? We crawl up in the Lord's lap and give Him all of our hurts, our pains, our fears, our disappointments and all of our many, many sins. We ask Him to forgive us and to help us. And He does! Then, not too much later, we try to quietly sneak up and take some or all of it back. But we are totally fooling ourselves if we think the Lord doesn't know what we are doing!

The thing is, the Lord wants us to leave all our burdens with Him. He wants to ease our load. In Matthew, He tells us, ' Come to me, ALL YOU who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.' How awesome is that?

Is there someone you need to forgive? Are you like me and need to forgive yourself? Do you need to rest?? Try crawling up in Jesus' lap today. I promise, He will comfort you and give you that much needed rest.

Blessings,

Teresa