PALS WITH THE BIG G: Day 23

Forgiveness is a primary tenant of the Christian faith, but is also one of the hardest to live up to.

People piss me off on a daily basis and it's not that we aren't allowed to react to the ugly feelings that build up inside, it's just that we shouldn't react in a way that abuses the person who made us upset in the first place. Even if everyone else said they'd deserve it. I'll say it again, this is hard.

This is something that I think I have said before or is at least in same vain in some of my past writings (in this post actually, and sort of again here), and is one of the reasons I'm so easy going and ready to just let things go. For me, there's a lot about other people that makes me angry if I think about it too much, and it can be depressing because it feels like there is no one who understands my view point on things. Over the years, I've come to find that everyone feels that way some of the time, so it has bothered me less. But in trying to be more expressive and up front about my emotions, I do find that while I am beginning to gradually change in a positive way, I'm also feeling some of that angst beginning to come up to the surface.

Sometimes it's not even people (usually, it's not even people); machines generally make me fly off the handle more than anything else. Why? Because they only have one job: do what you were made to do, but a lot of the time that's not what you get. For some reason, this happens especially when you don't need it to. And it's so frustrating, but in the end I do know that if I just calm down and think about the situation there is a rational and logical explanation for what is happening (actually, this just happened RIGHT NOW). And it is with this realization that forgiveness can come in to play even when the situation only involves only yourself. Forgiveness is the act of moving past adversity, of letting go of negativity and getting on with life, even if the conflict is only within ourselves. It means "I will not be troubled by you anymore" whether that applies to our fellow humans around us, or to situations of our own creation.

Again, I'd like to set this insight up as a touchstone for myself, something that I can come back and read whenever I feel myself boiling over. I want to make something that I can learn from and by making it public, I'm learning to forgive myself for worrying about things that I don't need to worry about and growing from it.

Just a little bit.