Forgiving Yourself

Wind is an interesting thing. It's the result of warm air rising from the ground, and cooler air rushing in to fill the now vacant space. When you hurt someone, and they forgive you, it's similar to the displacement of warm air. The empty space, caused by the pain, has a numbing effect and it's hard to understand how then can forgive you. To forgive yourself, something has to fill that space.

I've been struggling lately to understand forgiveness. It seems that forgiving yourself and accepting the forgiveness of others is every bit as challenging as extending your own forgiveness to someone. Perhaps even more so.

Offering love and forgiveness to someone, when it's the last thing they deserve, can only be attributed to grace. And grace seems to be in direct contradiction with every part of us that is human. But it's there, alive and deep within us, pulsing throughout our veins. To me, the only logical explanation for such an unearthly thing is that grace is nothing short of God's love and spirit eternally flowing into us, our hearts left inundated. Grace seems like the cool breeze that flows into the empty space to heal the pain. It's limitless, infallible, eternal, and most of all, undeserved.

Being so undeserving is the problem. Struggling to understand God's eternal love and grace is a hopeless task because we are so fallible and incapable of such a notion. Again, the only explanation is that things such as grace and love, despite our countless faults and failures, comes from something that is not of this world. These things are difficult to explain and go beyond our understanding, and the only option, for me at least, becomes having faith and simply accepting it. It's something that you can feel yet not touch, like a gentle breeze pressing against your skin.

Grace's amazing hands, they're ugly,
They're bruised by the blows that I have blown.
She knows well I don't deserve her,
But she laughs and says, That's the way love goes.
-Dave Barnes, Grace's Amazing Hands