Forgiveness - The Many Forms

November 18. Hello big world, Thursday is finishing up & for me it was a Long & strong day. The most important part of it is the fact that I did not drink or use a drug, being sober needs to always remain a highlight of my days as they go by. To kick it off my father & I went early in the morning to the building that my new store is going into. After waiting around a long time, then doing busy work on display cases for a long time, we finally got with the building owner & got into a plan of action. Once things got rolling in a positive direction we got more work done than I could have imagined completing at all today. There were some discrepencies with code & changes needed to be made to the layout, actually some is still in the air for approval. This utterly frustrated me, because it seemed that I was told one thing to comply, then when doing it something else was not compliant. Thankfully my father was there & helped me keep my cool & focus, as well there was several times during the day that I returned that reassurance to him. That is the difference in being sober today, I can actually on occasion be of use to someone else. :) After putting in more than double the time into the building prep that I had hoped, mom met up with us & we went to eat after cleaning up a bit. We still have to go back many times before opening to finish the work to the space, but it will come along as all projects do with patience. After dinner I rested my back for a half an hour then had to get right back up to go chair a meeting nearby my house. I was dreading having to go, but afterwards I realize why I do go, because it changes everything about my day & I am the person I want to be afterwards.

At the group an awesome topic came up, so I thought I would write more about it here because it really helps me to apply it in my life. Forgiveness. Looking at that word most of us immediately think we are talking about forgiving someone else for their wrongs done to us. That is a good part of the word, but in recovery it has so much more depth & meaning to work spiritually in our lives. We must begin with ourselves, or none of our other attempts will work to forgive. To forgive ourselves for all the things we have done, all the pain we have caused, and all the times we fell short in our alcoholic/addicted daze, we need to tap into a power greater than ourselves. Being spiritually diseased we do not internally posess these abilities, if we did we would not have drugs or drink in our pasts as coping devices & crutches. That greater power comes from our Higher Power, one that we MUST believe is completely forgiving of us & our mistakes from within & outside the boundries of our disease. With that borrowed power to forgive ourselves, we become able to geniunely & internally forgive ourselves as well. If we have not gotten to this point yet, then we have not yet found our Higher Power & gotten close enough to believe that forgiveness is an option. This has been one of my difficult areas of recovery, for many months in the beginning I stressed about the things I did wrong. Those stresses & strains caused me to look more at the wrongs of others that may have contributed to my problems than at my own self where it all had to begin. Once I got guided through the help of others, forgiveness became a reachable act of the heart. Some of it I think had to have developed from me finally for once, in sobriety, being able to get in touch with real feelings & actually feeling them for a change.

Once we have begun to practice self forgiveness, because we will never be able to master it, we can begin to forgive others. We don't have to forgive them & be their friends, we don't have to forgive them for their sake at all. We MUST forgive others for our own sobriety to remain intact. Resentments will lead us back to our old ways, seeking escape, and a drink or drugs again will return. We won't be able to immediately forgive everything, some things may take me years as it has with others. We start small & simple, as we are practicing we get better at borrowing our Higher Power's ability to forgive & learn to use it in larger scales in our own lives. This whole time that we are learning to do this, others who were already capable may in fact see this change, and SOME of those others may grow into forgiving us. It's those moments of warmth that ultimately remind me of how worthwhile my sober adventure is. I capitalized the word "SOME" of those people, because NOT ALL will or are required to forgive us. In the end their ability to forgive may not ever develop towards us, afterall some people are just as sick as we were in addiction without drugs or drinks & some of those people will never see a program to help them recover from their spiritual defects. We need to be okay with the fact that some people will never forgive us & some are incapable of forgiving us as well. At the end of the day our sobriety and spiritual growth depends on our ability to forgive, not theirs. So we must do what is right regaurdless of their part or next move. We always have an option of not associating with that person if they are that toxic to us or cause constant problems for us. What matters is that we grow to forgive, and forgive to grow. I hope that one day I am able to run out of things to be forgiven of & have cast forgiveness from my heart to the last offender as well, but I know that this world of human beings makes that impossible. We are flawed. I can work on myself though daily, becoming closer to living as a spiritual being & less like a human being each day. That my friends is what makes this adventure all worthwhile. Good Night. Good Morning... <3 Jimmy