Hello....
Lately I've been talking to quite a few people that have been discussing "pain". Now, I'm not talking about pain in the physical sense but I'm talking about hurt or brokenness. There was a person that was once in my life and he didn't treat me right. You know the saying, "You gone reap what you sow". I probably said this to myself one million times but one day I woke up and realized that the greatest advancement for me and my destiny was to forgive him. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I forgave. Just last week, I received a phone call from this person wanting to apologize because he felt that he didn't treat me right! I was speechless and all I could say to him was "wow" because honestly I'd already forgiven him.
I want to submit to you what I learned. A person can only do to you what you allow or give them permission to do and even after that, you have the power to name what they've done. What they’ve done can either be a blessing or a curse all depending on how you label it. I used an analogy recently and talked about French doors that most people have in their homes that lead out to balconies or the patio. To most people, a French door is a beautiful accent to a home, a means of entry/exit, just a door, or something else. But to me, French doors meant fear and pain because my last association with "French doors" was when someone broke into our home, beat, and raped my family member! So, to this day when I see French doors or an open window in my personal domain... I feel uneasy at first! This is known in the psychology world as "Classical conditioning" which is merely learning by association. Consider it our preconditioned method of how we respond to stimuli (something external that influences our behavior). So, what am I saying? What others consider to be a beautiful element or addition to a home, I consider to be evil and a direct cause of fear. Why? Because my former experience with anything that looked remotely like a French door wasn't pleasant. Therefore, any reference to French doors is immediately labeled as negative for me because they are associated to that one single negative experience.
Many times when people "hurt" us or cause an unpleasant response in our lives, we label it that way because we fail to shift our mindsets to consider that it may be something different. Could it be that we've associated their actions as negative based on what we've experienced and have called "negative"? A lot of times we aren't prone to look within ourselves when bad things happen because every negative thing is normally associated with actions that have been done to us by someone else! Negative associations like pain, hurt, fear, and anger aren't normally feelings that we explore within ourselves, they are normally feelings that we infer are direct results of others. However, I'd like for us to consider that perhaps pain, fear, hurt, and anger are actual elements that come to reveal a certain truth within us. There's an old saying that says "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% of how you respond". If we choose to respond in anger, hurt, fear, disappointment, shame, and etc., then ladies and gentlemen I would like to suggest that perhaps these are paths that lead right back to us. What is it about this situation that made you angry? Does one control your life enough that they can get anger, fear, hurt, or disappointment out of you by one single action?
Lastly, I want to go back to why I understand now that I had to forgive him. To be honest, a lot of times I forgive because I don't really have a heart to hate people. I have a heart to separate myself from you but not to hate you! So generally speaking, forgiveness comes easy for me.. FORGETTING DOESN'T!!!!! but forgiveness does. Anyway, a lot of times when we come to the place of “people hurting us”, we associate this pain with other pain that we've felt and this person goes in the category with everybody else as the "one that hurt you"! And I can be honest and say for me that most of the time I used this method to determine what type of person this was that hurt me because of my former associations. So, if you rejected me, you went in the pile with everyone else that rejected me and you would be labeled as someone that was selfish, manipulative, deception, backstabber, you get the picture! But, there is another side to this that I never considered before. There is a term called "theory of correspondent inferences", which basically says that we use the actions of people to tell us about their personalities and intentions. I didn't realize that this is exactly what I did until he picked up the phone and called me. At the moment that I received that phone call I realized that he was just the type of man that I always thought he was although he made a couple of weird and crazy choices. Because honestly, it takes a real big person to admit that they were wrong and apologize. So my forgiveness didn't say "I guess I will since I'm supposed to".. ...My forgiveness said, "Yes I will because at any other time on any other day, it could have been me that did this to someone else although it wasn't my intentions". I know that actions speak louder than words but if you don't get a chance to really perceive a person's heart, you just may mistake an atypical behavior as being an example of their overall personality when in reality there may have been something that caused them to react in that way.
So, although lengthy....the message today is to take a mandatory shift with how we perceive people and their behaviors. Before you judge what a person does as being the sole determining factor of who they are think back on some of the crazy things you've done and ask yourself....."Is that what I want someone to think of me?"
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