Forgiveness

I am overwhelmed with the thought of forgiveness. Oddly, it’s not forgiveness for another. It’s forgiveness for me. I have spent my whole life being hard on myself, especially in the last three years when I fought two years FOR my marriage and let it go in the last year. As if fell apart, I blamed myself more that anyone else. I foolishly believed that it was within my sole control to make my marriage better, to make it strong, to make it last. One day, at the bottom of my pit, my then-pastor preached a sermon about how God chips away what is not of Him. He encouraged us to pray for God to do this to us so that we can grow closer to Him. That day, I prayed for God to take out of my life what was not of Him. And, in the following months, He did just that. He took away my false sense of security. He took away my failing marriage. He took away a family that I had drawn so close. He took away the image of what I thought my life had to look like. But, for each thing that he chipped away, He replaced it with more love, more encouragement, more faith, more forgiveness than I have ever known. I love God. I have always loved Him. But, now, I know He loves me. He forgives me. I know it and I feel it. And now it’s time to give the same forgiveness to myself. You see, I am soooooo scared to mess up, to fail. I have always felt this way. The really cool thing is that I am okay with that now. I am okay with messing up. I am okay with making mistakes. I am okay with back-sliding. I am okay that my pendulum does not rest in dead-center. It swings from side to side. I am going to make many more mistakes in the however-many years that God had me on this earth. And I am okay with that. I will forgive myself because He has already forgiven me.