Day 13: Choose to Fellowship, Choose to Forgive

Amazon volcanic uranium tower. Best improv ever.

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The polite selfish attitudes we harbor are really just signs of conditional love. "I love you because/if/when _________" rather than "I love you even though/in spite of/always." That's not to be out of pity or personal glory, but out of true love and acceptance. We can do this in two ways.

First, we need to fellowship. There are two parts- we spend time with people, and we ENJOY it! Get out of the house! Go have dinner! Invite someone to card night! AND TALK!!! Tun the phone of and enjoy the person/people you are with. I am blessed to have a Sunday school class that gets together outside of church (be it planned of "impromptu hang"s), but I'm even more blessed to have individual relationship identities with them out side of the larger social gatherings. And I love spending time with them, chatting, playing games, working on some project, whatever. And these are the kind of people who go out of their way to plan important things around your schedule so that you can be involved. One person in particular I have gotten to know through individual meetings that happen about every 5-6 weeks. We get dinner or coffee or dessert and just spend a couple hours being honest and sharing what's going on in out lives, encouraging one another and praying over each other in-between meetings. And it's so refreshing. To just put away the barriers and talk about God's work in our lives. . . I"m still working on the "talking about myself" part, but this has really helped me. And we keep doing it because we enjoy spending out time that way.

The second thing we need to do is forgive. Here's the myth we hear so often: forgive and forget. WE CAN'T. If you thought that was just a problem you had, you don't: we are not able to forget as humans! I know that I have an abnormal memory, but I still don't believe that anyone ever heals from emotional scars because of their imprint. I think Fitzgerald had something with this:

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Forgiveness a choice, not a feeling, but it's also not a free license for the other person to be trusted. You can love and forgive, but they still have to earn that trust back, and that's OK. Forgiveness comes naturally once we start to fully realize God's forgiveness in our own lives.

Point to Ponder: The only way I can find the strength to forgive others is to embrace the fact that Jesus has forgiven me.
I'm thankful that I don't hold a lot of grudges. Still, there are people I need to deal with and straighten out my side of the relationship, regardless of how they treat me. And really, how powerful the forgiveness that God has given us! We can't even really fathom it. So who are we to keep our forgiveness from others?

Verse to Remember: 1 John 1:9- "God is faithful and reliable. If we confess our sins, he forgives them and cleanses us from everything we've done wrong."
ALL of them. We don't need to fear future sins either, because they're already forgiven (after all, the sins of our past, present, and future were ALL in the future as compared to Christ's death).

Question to Consider: How can I take my experiences of fellowship a step deeper? Who is the person in my life I need to forgive?
I need to be more open and willing to talk. Generally I'm not a conversation starter, but I also am not afraid of silence, so it's a bad combo. I also need to not be ashamed of talking about God in "regular conversation." As far as the second question, I know a person that I need to deal with.