Unpacking forgiveness

Forgiveness – The ideas attributed to forgiveness are often pre-packaged with a whole host of assumptions, a tonne of pain, a few shovelfuls of offence, confusion about moving forward etc etc etc and when you’re in the middle of a knot it can be pretty tricky to figure out which is what. It’s also pretty often that the knot itself is what gets in the way of being able to forgive when we assume more is meant by it than is so.

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Of Wardrobes and Gratitude

I hid in the wardrobe and listened to their worried voices calling my name.

“Heather? Heather! Where are you?! Where IS she?”

I’d never climbed in there before. This was a one-off. I remember drawing my knees up under my chin, feeling the clothes against my face and drawing the solid sliding door closed to within an inch or so – the most shut I could make it while curling my 10 year old fingers around the edge from the inside.

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Scary prayers

Reasons God doesn’t answer our prayers. The standard human responses to that question are that He will answer with either a ‘yes’, a ‘no’, or a ‘wait’. There have been many prayers I’ve prayed that I have not seen the answers I desired to see. Many. Some I have still not reached a place of peace about… either because someone I love died, or because I’m still currently waiting and hoping.

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Gran’ma and her prayers

I only have one memory of spending one on one time with my Gran’ma. I have heaps and heaps of wider family memories, but just the one with her by myself. I must have been in primary school at the time as I was left with her for the day while I was sick and Mum had to go do something. I was looking at a piece of her handwriting and noticed the differences between her style of cursive and my own. I loved the old fashioned ‘f’s’ and ‘t’s’ and ‘r’s’ in particular and got her to show me how to form them. She sat so patiently with me and showed me over and over and over how to do them, until I got the flow of it and from that day forward, I started incorporating what she taught me into the way I wrote. The extra curls and swirls were much more artistic than the way that I knew.

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See


SEE

1

See yourself.
See yourself standing in your spot on the planet.
See yourself in your spot on the planet
as a singular dot existing in a sphere of time.
See your dot on the planet in the sphere of time within another sphere
called “the lower heavens”.
See your dot on the planet in its place in time in the lower heavens
in the never-ending multi-dimension called eternity.

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Enough love?

Ever since Miss 6 was born she’s had several ‘other mothers’ – namely her 3 older sisters, but this comment is about the elder one of 9 years.

So many times when Miss 6 was a baby, Miss Then Nine would sidle up quietly beside me as we went rushing out the door and say “Don’t worry about a bag Mum, I’ve packed some nappies and wipes and a change of clothes…”

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The Maker

I’ve never believed that PMS is an excuse for bad behaviour. It might be a reason, but it’s not an excuse. That was easier in the days when it never affected me but these days there’s a couple of times in the month when my tolerance factor drops waaaaaaaaaay down from my fairly placid usual self. I still believe PMS isn’t an excuse for bad behaviour but I’ve discovered that just knowing that, doesn’t give way to automatically behaving well… and even less so, feeling like I WANT to behave well.

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