Forgiveness always helps because to forgive is to embrace the loving option. Love heals depression by allowing it’s healing “of the opening up of yourself to yourself and of the opening up of yourself to others” to take place. For essentially depression is a sign of your closing down to yourself and to life. The way to allow growth through and past your depression is to start forgiving yourself for having allowed this degree of closing down of yourself to yourself and to life to have taken place. Depression is a really deep and painful and lonely place to be, but it very deepness is what allows you to grow, for in life you grow most from the deepest pain and the deepest feelings and the most penetratingly painful experiences will often teach you the most. So depression as I said allows you to have feelings more deeply and this then will open the other side of depression which is forgiveness. When you have any feeling other than happiness or experience any state other than love, it is time to think about forgiveness. Forgive yourself first by just accepting yourself, for acceptance is the first step of forgiveness. The second step is to acknowledge that depression is a part of life and of your life and to look for the hidden jewels hiding in the darkness of depression. Forgiveness is the candle or the light in this darkness that will allow you to see the jewel which is your soul sparkling and shining with a glimmering hope, that hope, that real hope that you will at last contact you as soul will begin to turn you around, and then the next step is humility. It takes true humility to forgive, and true forgiveness makes you humble. So from there when you can touch yourself as soul, and feel a little your value and that you have indeed a unique purpose and unique gifts and that you are a part of Gods overall plan for all of life, you will maybe realise your part in it all is just to be you. Be you by accepting you, loving you, forgiving you and humbly listening to you and to God so that the depression only becomes a curtain that you know will be pulled aside in time but that it comes to you sometimes to enable you to remain humble and to realise that all light comes from God and all light originates from God. Maybe we might see then that our depression comes from us because we have mistakenly thought that we are doing all this ourselves and living entirely on our own, separately and without help or assistance or understanding and loving connection to others and from others. Connect back to yourself and to God and feel the power of this connection. Feel loved and feel the humility that comes from forgiving yourself and pulling back the curtain of your depression to reveal the beautiful drama that always is playing behind the curtain and that the curtain only closes from time to time to highlight the movement from each stage of the play you are participating in only to reopen and display a new you and a renewed you as you again take part in the ensuing drama that is your life.
Life problems will still come to you, and this is you where you will get the chance to creatively solve them with your acceptance of the problem and your creation of the answers. Acceptance is no more or no less that loving what is and loving your life and loving all life. With a full love of all life acceptance is natural and all problems vanish in love. Until you can accept life fully, allow forgiveness to lift you from the depression that sometimes comes to you mainly because you have not seen the possibility of love it also brings. You will begin to see this love as you forgive, and the seeing of the love will start to lift your depression. Never forget this mighty connection which allows these cycles to take place and remember that is all they are, cycles that you can and will move out from and away from in time through forgiveness which is indeed the mighty reconnector back to yourself, to life and to God.
JESUS AND THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS
You don’t need to be a Christian to forgive – it’s a basic human activity. However, Jesus has a remarkable place in our awareness of forgiveness, and everyone who has a concern for forgiveness needs to learn from his approach.
And firstly we need to be clear that Jesus certainly lived out the active and external or public aspect of forgiveness. He viewed forgiveness as a power – an active force for good, which he could bring into the situation. Mark’s Gospel records early on how, when he was asked to heal a paralysed man, Jesus initially responded by saying to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” In his ensuing dialogue with the scribes he asked what a clearly vital question was for him: “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take your stretcher, and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” – he said to the paralytic – “I tell you, get up, take your stretcher, and go to your home.” (Mark 2.9-11)
There is no sense in which Jesus had been wronged by the man. We don’t even know that he ‘knew’ supernaturally what sins the man had committed, although John’s gospel does present Jesus as possessing that kind of knowledge (John 4.18,39). His forgiveness – God’s power in him – was not a reaction to being wronged. He forgave the man because he wanted to bring about a transformation – a dramatic improvement – in the man’s life. This is a continuation of the extraordinary dynamic summarised in that most-quoted of all Bible verses, John 3.16 (“God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son…”). Most human wrongdoing was not directed personally to God; yet God initiated extraordinary mercy to help people in a mess. When forgiveness is viewed as a reaction-a response – then we might want to insist that the powerless can forgive as much as the powerful. This is part of the trend of an ‘interiorising’ spirituality which we will look at below. But if it is to be an action which changes a situation, it needs power.
In his public ministry, Jesus powerfully delivered a forgiveness which changed people physically and spiritually. In the passive mode of his ‘passion’, Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross was a reaction – instead he called on his Father to forgive them. In the ensuing resurrection lifestyle of the early church, God could transform the onlookers’ hearts, and the Spirit of Jesus could bring his own power to forgive……to be continued. Culled from OVERCOMING THE SPIRIT OF UNFORGIVENESS. To order for book/ prayers and counseling call 07036602410
