After writing last week’s post about forgiveness, I realized that there was so much left unsaid about this subject. There is so much more to the story, at least for me, that I decided to dedicate another post (in this series) to it. In all reality, I could probably spend four more weeks on it and still not do justice to the impact it has had on my life.

Forgiveness has been such a major factor in my healing process and it affected me long before I ever realized that it did.

My parents taught me to forgive others and in this area, they certainly walked their talk. I often heard my dad pray for his “enemies,” or those who had hurt him and I saw my mom respond to insensitivity with kindness, a meal, a hug, or a card. I watched them both reach out to my older sister when she had accidently become the perpetrator in my brother’s death. They never blamed her or held it against her, that she forgot to pull the keys and then failed to see when her little brother crawled back into the parked car, and rolled it down a very long hill.

They showed me how to grieve, and yet forgive at the same time.

I knew from their example that it was good and beautiful and Godly, to forgive. But I did not yet understand how important or powerful it was.

Until years later when I came to Oasis with my Dad, for his cancer treatment.

That’s when I began to understand just how important it is to forgive, not only others, but also yourself. Dr Contreras spoke often about the importance of it when it comes to healing cancer. He spoke of the miracles he witnessed when a person released his/her body from the prison of anger, bitterness, and hatred. And chose forgiveness.

I saw a few of them, myself. I will never forget the middle aged man who had come there for his third or fourth round of treatment, and found his body clear of cancer after he released and forgave his father. He told us the story. It was one of severe abuse and hardship and yet he had overcome his fate, he had canceled out his death sentence, with one single act of forgiveness.

This man touched my dad and I in ways he will probably never know.

I remembered him later, when I had made myself sick from feeding on the lie that I was “not enough” for my husband. I remembered his story when I saw the deterioration of my physical body, after only a few years of the brutal punishment I had inflicted upon it.

I knew that something had to change, when I woke up one day with my eighteen-month old baby sitting on top of me, “reading” her books, and I had no idea how she had gotten there. My body was so depleted of insulin, it had shut down and I had passed out on the bed in her room.

I knew when I collapsed in a pile of self-inflicted misery at the top of a deserted Tennessee mountain that I could not come back to our home, the same way I had left. I was done running. I was done fighting! I was done resisting the power of love and forgiveness that had relentlessly pursued me there.

I decided that day to agree with God when he told me that I was worthy. Worthy of life and joy and abundance. I would listen to him when he spoke through a friend and told me that I was worth singing and dancing over. I would let myself be loved again. And from that day forward I would find a way to be kinder to myself.

It was the smallest baby step, but it was a step toward healing, nonetheless. A very important one that continues to heal me, to this day.

I know that I would not be here if I had not made that choice. If I had not surrendered to love that day, I would not have gotten off of that bed. Or come back from that mountain.

But I did. And my “baby” has a much happier, healthier Mama, because of it.

I encourage you, my friend, to make that same choice. If you find yourself at the bottom of your own inflicted wounds or the wounds of another, I urge you to let them go. I invite you to the freedom and the health that is yours. Let go of the hate and anger and surrender to LOVE.

Your life and your family and your healing depends on it.

I  want to leave you with the words of Marianne Williamson, who says it best when she says this:

As you forgive others, you begin to forgive yourself. As you stop focusing on their mistakes, you will stop punishing yourself for your own. Your ability to release what you think of as the sins of others will free you to release yourself, putting down the weapon with which you punish yourself so savagely.

Forgiveness releases the past to divine correction and the future to new possibilities. Whatever it was that happened to you, it is over. It happened in the past; in the present, it does not exist unless you bring it with you. Nothing anyone has ever done to you has permanent effects, unless you hold on to it permanently.”

That, I am learning, is the beauty and the importance and the power of forgiveness.