Fighting for Control

Jesus and I are wrestling for control of the steering wheel that is the directional for the car of my life.  It would seem as though I am winning, until I swerve into the left lane and oncoming traffic, but Jesus pulls car back into the right lane at the last moment.  This happens multiple times, until I finally get savvy to what He is doing, and begin to fight back again, even as He is saving my life.  One more close call, and I am fed up with His intervening in my driving, and jab His hands from the wheel with my elbow.  In that moment, though, I swerve the car in the opposite direction, and into a tree.  There is a sickening twist of metal, and the taste of iron in the back of my throat.  My body should be colliding with the tree with a sharp smack and cracking of bones, but something stops me, something protects me.  It is Jesus, throwing His own body over mine, to keep me from hurtling forward, as I should.  He, instead of I, takes the full force of the impact, and just like that, it is Jesus taking my place in the grave.

And given the opportunity, He would do it all over again.

Forgiving AND Forgetting

I sat down to write this post yesterday. I had a very, very long post written out, but as I got to the end I began to truly think about what I was writing about, and I realized that, well, I didn't like the advice I was giving. Don't get me wrong, I totally and fully believe that this is good advice, but it wasn't advice that I was following until now.

Today I'm gonna try a little harder
Gonna make every minute last longer

Gonna learn to forgive and forget
'Cause we don't have long, gonna make the most of it

As much as I love that entire song, it's the quoted lyrics above that truly speak to me. That's what I've always struggled with. I never thought that I had an issue with forgiveness, but as I was writing the post, I realized that I was squirming as I tried to draw the line between just forgiving and forgiving and forgetting. I've always said that I have no issue forgiving, that I do it for my benefit. But I'm also a huge grudge holder. Therefore I've believed that I forgive people, but I don't forget what they did. Is that really ever true forgiveness though?

I mean, yeah, you can never truly forget what happened if it was a super big deal, but what I'm saying is that you need to be able to look past it. Which was where my forgiveness usually stopped. I don't really even know how I was able to say that I had forgiven a person when whenever I thought about them, or what they had done, anger would boil up in my mind. That, my darlings, isn't forgiveness. That is, in fact, lying to yourself.

As I wrote the post yesterday about how it was okay to just forgive, and not forget, sometimes, I tried to think about what forgiveness was then. Because it surely wasn't what I had been doing. My stomach squirmed as I tried to justify myself, tried to tell myself that it was okay. And I just couldn't do it. I wasn't looking past what had happened, and I truly couldn't forgive until I had.

But forgiveness was just too scary. What if my forgiveness was taken and snapped into two pieces? What if it totally backfired? What if what if what if? Right now, after taking that chance we call forgiveness, I'm laughing at myself. Forgiveness is worth that chance, because even if it does backfire, does it actually cause anymore harm?

I encourage you to take that leap of forgiveness today. Even if the person doesn't want it, forgiving other people will make you feel a whole lot better, because holding onto that anger takes so much energy.

"I can forgive, but I cannot forget, is only another way of saying, I will not forgive. Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note - torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one."

~Henry Ward Beecher

"The Knife of Never Letting Go": Pre-reading

Today, I finally checked the book "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness. Intrigued by the title I picked it up off of the shelf about a year and a half ago to read the summary on the book jacket, not very hooked by it, I set the book back down carefully and left it be. Since then, many of my friends have told me about what a wonderful book it is, and that I should read it. Though the title really had me pulled in, the description of the book did not, no matter how many good reviews the book got. Once again it was a featured book on the shelves of my school library, and once again I picked it up, trying to decide if I should try it or not. On one hand, I'm an extremely picky reader, on the other hand, so many people had given raving reviews about it.

I decided to finally check it out, figuring that it couldn't be horrible, even if it wasn't my usual reading style. Plus, I really wanted to find out how the title, "The Knife of Never Letting Go," fit into the plot. Ever since I first picked the novel up, the phrase of the title had made me think. Never letting go can be as painful as a knife. It totally made sense to me, since that's one thing that I have a really big difficulty doing, letting go of my past.

I know very well how damaging it can be to try and live in my own memories, and never be willing to admit that most of them are just eras in the past now. It causes horrible feelings, and obvious pain. It is, in a sense, a mental, or emotional, knife. Holding onto everything we know can do no good.

So it is with high hopes that this book expresses some of those thoughts that I begin to read. I'll try to keep you all updated on my findings as I read through, but who knows how long it will take me to get through this novel. If I end up really liking it, I'll have read the entire book in two or three days, if I end up bored out of my mind, it'll take me two or three weeks to get through. So I guess it depends entirely on how much I like the book on how much I update about it. Feel free to join me in the reading of "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness and add your own thoughts in the comments below!