Forgiveness is About Building Bridges

 Forgiveness has, so far, been my favorite of the Follow Me series, I think because it has all pointed to this week’s lesson – that forgiveness is not about what has happened, but what you make of it, forgiveness is about building bridges into the future. 

 

The picture of the arched bridge is a perfect illustration of the concept. All the things we’ve done wrong, all the mistakes we’ve made, all the mean or thoughtless things we’ve said or done are the foundation we NEED to understand how much we need forgiveness. And once we have truly admitted them to ourselves and therefore also to God, we have begun the process of building on them – of using those terrible feelings to reach forward, to ask for and accept forgiveness like the arch reaches across and is strengthened by what has gone before and what is ahead.

 

Though this sounds like a very hard lesson to teach your children, and yes, it is a lesson for kids old enough to be genuinely empathetic, it is probably one of the most critical in terms of life skills and them growing into happy and emotionally mature people. But it is also one of the most common sense – we have to have made mistakes to learn – this is as true about not turning the handle bars on your bike too sharply as it is about not hitting someone who takes a toy from you…no matter how mad you are. When you hurt someone, either with your words or with your hands, just like when you hurt yourself, it makes YOU feel terrible. It makes you not want to do it again, and that’s where the learning comes in. Our job as parents, mentors or adults who care deeply about children is to help them through these lessons, to help them understand that we all make these mistakes, that it’s part of being human, that it’s part of learning how to be the people that God put us here to be. It’s not always easy, it’s not always fun, and it doesn’t always feel good – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good, kind of like yucky tasting medicine that makes us feel better. 

 

Simple things (ok, not always easy and not always fun) done with great love.

 

-Carolyn Hayes 

Director of Children and Young Families