Forgiveness

As I worked on one of the last quilts I did, I noticed the black background gathered a ton of lint on it, and after cleaning it off, there it appeared again. Life is like that. Sometimes we must revisit an issue we have tried to move past more than once. There are lots of challenges in life. Each challenge we experience is for our own good, even if we don't understand why. Some things are because of things we do, some things from actions of others. And still some from life itself, no ones fault, just the way it is. The challenge we must focus on is how we handle life's challenges. A lot of time forgiveness is needed to truly move on. Forgiveness is essential for our eternal growth. And just like the lint that continued to get on my quilt, things continue to happen to us through out our lives.

Here is that pesky lint that I found on my quilt along with my lint roller, all clean.

Here is the quilt after I cleared the lint, but it still had a few pieces I had to work a little harder to remove.

After constant rolling, and some picking off by hand, my quilt was clean again.

I had to repeat this process several times. Repentance is like this. Sometimes we can forgive someone very easily. We run over the problem once, and it's done. We can move on. But then there are times we must revisit our forgiveness process. Not that we have done anything wrong, but sometimes it isn't as easy to move past things that happen. We find that we just can't roll the quilt clean, but must pick some of the pieces off by hand. These might be times that we have been hurt deeply, and maybe not because of what was done to us but to a loved one. We must reach deep inside, pray more sincerely, and strive a little harder to understand. Sometimes we can not forgive until we understand. We need to understand where another person is coming from, why they act, say, or do things. Just because we understand doesn't mean we agree. We can understand someone's thoughts and actions without agreeing with them. Then we can have true forgiveness in our hearts and move forward in our life. So the next time you have a hard time cleaning off all those 'spots' from your 'quilt', remember that those pieces of lint not easily removed can be 'picked' off. It might be hard and tedious work, but it is possible and the end result is a beautiful thing. 

And no matter how hard I tried, there was still some lint on the quilt. I guess that just goes to show that our forgiveness process is never done. Forgiveness is not just an eternal concept, but also an eternal blessing.