Finding the Joy in Forgiveness

Finding the Joy in Forgiveness

I am going to write a blog series on forgiveness. Some of my Aha moments on the subject you may find interesting.

Forgiveness of others, forgiveness of self, forgiveness of God. The humbling need of forgiveness and finding that place within yourself to forgive the unforgivable.

I will start today with “forgiveness of others” sounds pretty simple, yet every day we can find something or someone in our lives to be mad at. Sometimes I go looking for something to be mad at. Crazy, I know but I have caught myself doing it.

Turn on the news, open up Facebook or any other social media, drive in traffic, wait in line, it’s there just waiting for you to grab up and be angry. The choices we make every day to tune into the anger will negatively impact our lives. What if we chose to tune into some happiness or joy instead. What if we tuned into gratitude, or better yet, what if we tuned into forgiving someone or something every day. 

To truly forgive someone is a bit harder than it sounds. It requires us to release any attachment we have to what triggered the emotion in the first place. Hmmm, can I do that, you ask? Sure, we all can.  I had a counselor once who I had confided my frustrations about some people in my life to. I was pretty angry at them and the situation I had found myself in. I have never forgotten the question he asked me…..He asked me, “Rhonda, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?”

That very simple question caused me a great deal of thought. Did I want to be right or happy? I wanted to be happy, right? Or maybe I just wanted someone to blame for my unhappy state of mind over a transgression, that in the end, really wasn’t more important that my happiness. Did I “hate” the people I was angry at? Was I willing to draw a red line in the sand over this event? Did I want to be happy? Did I want to be right?

I decided to be happy. Happy or Right is just one technique I have learned to help me towards forgiveness of others. You can’t be “happy” if you can’t forgive. Give it a try. It works. Meditate on it for a bit, it may take a couple days of consideration before you decide if you want to be happy or right.

I am certainly not saying that every step of forgiveness is this easy, it isn’t. But let’s try this the next time someone cuts us off in traffic, disagrees with our actions or snags our parking space…..let’s ask ourselves…..Do I want to be Happy or Right. With so many emotions we can choose to have, let’s work harder on being happy than on being mad.