FORGIVENESS IS GOOD FOR THE BOTH OF YOU...FOR THE ALL OF US (Continuation of Series)

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IS THERE ANYONE THAT AT THIS MOMENT YOU HATE?

Elizabeth Barrett was a poet who is best remembered by her married name, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 

       But her father had forbidden her to marry Robert Browning.  In fact, when she married Browning, he disowned her and never spoke to her again.

Still, each week for the rest of his life, she wrote him a letter from Italy where she and Robert had gone to live.  But not once did her father reply.

After his death she received in the mail a large box with each one of the unopened letters inside. 

They are among the most beautiful letters to be found in classical English literature.  And perhaps, just perhaps, if her father had read her letters their relationship might have been repaired and restored. 

Though that never happened, it had not keep his daughter from weekly expressing her love and forgiveness.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO FREE OF THE GREAT ANGER THAT A LACK OF PRACTICING FORGIVENESS CAN BRING?

He was a priest in the Philippines, a much loved man of God, but he carried a great burden, a secret sin he had committed in his youth.  He had repented, but he could find no peace, no sense of God’s forgiveness.

In his parish was a woman who deeply loved God and who claimed to have visions in which she spoke with Christ and He with her.  The priest, however, was skeptical.

 To test her he said, “The next time you speak with Christ, I want you to ask Him what sin your priest committed while he was in seminary.”  The woman agreed.

A few days later she came to the priest and told of the recent conversation she had with Christ, and how she had asked Him what sin her priest had committed those many years before.

“And what did He say?’ the impatient priest asked. “What did He say?”

He said, “I don’t remember.”

You see…what Christ forgives.  He forgets.

       We can find glory in the fact that there are thousands more stories like those I have JUST WRITTEN this morning…and there will be thousands more in the years to come.  Tiny but major moments of FORGIVENESS miracle dust filling the air and giving us hope, for life is about momentum, about how we can affect the world in such positive ways when we cease to act like petulant children and give our better selves a chance to shine.

       Thomas Edison had been steadily working in his lab trying to develop a light bulb.  For 24 hours straight, he and his team of men had been laboring to finish what they were sure this time would work. 

At the top of a set of stairs was the socket where the light bulb was to be installed.  It would then flood the entire room with light.  Why he gave the precious object of so many hours of labor to a young member of the team to carry up those stairs will never be known, but he did. And as the lad climbed the stairs weariness or nerves must have overcome him, and he dropped it.

For 24 more hours the team worked to construct yet another light bulb.  And when it was ready, Edison turned and gave this second light bulb to the same young man to carry up the stairs.

Have you ever paid a visit to a home and even though the husband and wife were smiling and pleasant, you could feel an undertone of strife? 

Or visited a home where the ambience was definitely loving and cheerful, and you were keenly aware of it?

Visit some churches and you can feel an undertone of strife.  Visit others and you can feel an undertone of love. 

Visit a church filled with pouting pettiness, a church where there is constant arguments - theological, political, whatever, and you can feel it and it is a church that is dying.

Visit a church where love abounds and you can feel it and that church is on the edge of a resurrection.

I’m not saying it is a piece of cake to achieve the kind of love and forgiveness I am talking about.  

If were easy, if it was second nature to us all, Jesus

would not have had to give us that radical Commandment – love thy neighbor as thyself.

              

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I Am

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Letters to America

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