Time to Walk Away

This is for you, if you are one who has not been lucky in love. I hope I can help. I want to at least. Perhaps you have chosen a partner who did not want what you wanted, did not feel what you felt, and did not want to walk beside you into a future together.

I have really had to sit with this and think deep and hard because I want to help you find the happiness you deserve. Sometimes you find yourself with someone who is not only not-walking with you, but subtly trying to kick your feet out from under you every chance they get.

In the beginning you thought you had found beautiful love and today you find you have a beautiful disaster. Love is a blessing, this we know. Unrequited love is toxic, and it can eat you alive.

Sometimes we fall in love with a person before we have fully come to know them. Othertimes it is not that so much but simply that they changed. They are not the same anymore. One day you are over the moon and the next disillusioned. Something rocked the pedestal. Sometimes we can recover and sometimes we can’t.

Loyalty and commitment teach us that we are not to walk away from people that we love. No one has preached more and stressed more intensely the need for forgiveness. It is important. How can we expect forgiveness from the Lord if we are not forgiving ourselves, especially to the one we made those vows with? But there is another side to that coin. And we need to see the other side of the coin too.

When your relationship is unbalanced and one person is hurting, how much is enough? How many pieces are supposed to break and how damaged can we allow ourselves to get before we accept that this type of love isn’t healthy? Love and relationships require work and responsibility, but at the same time there is a bending point and a breaking point.

Here are some things I do know:

1. If there is a feeling better than love, I have not felt it. Take the risk and dive in with everything you have.

2. Enjoy the good times together as they are happening and be grateful for them. Enjoy, but remember to give thanks.

3. Stay out of the future and in the moment. Now is certain.

4. Protect both your heart and your partner’s. We are human and we deserve kindness. We don’t need to add to the burdens we already carry by hurting others. Trust me, it doesn’t make things better.

5. If your relationship starts to crumble, know when to put it down and let it be. Don’t grind it into dust.

6. You cannot continue to give to another person when you are so broken, so beaten down that you have no energy left. When talking has failed and words no longer have meaning, this is when you know it is over. When you feel like this, you have to do what is best for everyone and wave the white flag to avoid further damage.

7. Some things just won’t work, no matter how badly we wish they would. Sometimes the match that felt so right just isn’t. Please don’t do more damage to your heart by trying to fix something that has past its expiration date. It will leave you raw.

8. It is okay to walk away from something that hurts you. It doesn’t require blame or justification. It just requires you to stop fanning the flames. There is a time to “shake off the dust from your feet.” The Lord knows if you have done your best. And if you can honestly say to yourself that you did your best then I know that later in life when you look back at this time you will not have any regrets because you will feel the peace that comes with knowing you did your best.

You will find love again, and next time it will feel better.

It WILL feel better. Life isn’t easy. Some things build us up and some tear us down. Our hearts expand and break and rebuild—repeatedly. We are constantly learning and changing and growing. When you find yourself in a bad situation, please stop picking at scabs. Nothing good has ever come from this. Stop the cycle. Surround yourself with loving relationships.

I think some don’t believe in their heart that they will ever find true love, and subconsciously chose partners pre-prepared for a challenge ahead. But you don’t need to settle for a challenge. You need not put yourself in a situation where you don’t know where you stand in their life, a place where you feel unsteady and unloved.

My heart truly goes out to the people out there who are in just such a bad place. I know much it hurts. I'm on the other side of that kind of pain and I can tell you and want to say that it will get better, I promise!

You may think you will never be happy again - just not true. There is a day coming where you will be consistently happy, balanced, and more joyful than ever. You will learn from this, learn more about yourself, even the dark side.

You will learn to be more honest, because you have learned how damaging ambivalence, ambiguity and misconceptions can be. You learn to appreciate the day, because you will have learned and become aware that it all can be over tomorrow, or in an hour, even in a moment. It is a poignant feeling, but not really that unpleasant. It makes you truly enjoy every moment you are together and reminds you to keep each day and the rest of your life as vibrant and exciting as possible.

I urge you to take the time needed to fall in love with yourself. Sometimes we place such a high importance on loving someone else, but what about ourselves? Where have you heard “love your neighbor as you love yourself?” We can’t give what we don’t have. We must love and honor ourselves before we can take the next step of loving someone else. We need this foundation. Once in place you are ready to build. Your house needs this solid foundation or you won’t be able to withstand the winds when they come. So take time now and build your foundation. And look forward to a better day, a brighter day and a happier day. It is coming. And it will be awesome, a love just as awesome as you.

Blessing to you, Ric

59

59 and still fine!  toot-toot.

I'm grateful to have lasted so long - In reasonable good health and nearly always good humour - With a fair number of good friends and an astonishingly large crowd of "Family." Still growing too -- we got babies showing up now.

Seems like a good age, I like both the numbers that make up 59, FIVE as well as NINE. I have a fondness for primes and a special fondness for 5 because it's so friendly, so reliable -- like a precisely ticking clock -- its multiplication table so gentle on the nerves that it takes no effort at all to know it.

As for 9! Whoa. It's got quasi-magical qualities, for which reason it is so often at the heart of number-puzzles. Its multiplication table isn't quite as obvious as 5's but it's still very cool. For instance the digits add up to 9 -- you know: 18 (1+8 = 9); 27 (2+7=9) etc. There's a lot of stuff like that connected with nine. My favorite number.

And the other thing I like about 59 is the sense of being on the brink of the abyss ... right John?

Part of my continual excitement about my birthday, every year, is that I never expected to live this long. I honestly didn't think I'd make it past 30. Yet here I am, close to being one year away from DOUBLE THIRTY.

Not quite there yet, but one year away. One measly year.

(and I may not make it. Who knows? There are no guarantees. Except the fact that there are no guarantees).

Wow. 

59. And still Fine.



Wow.

The Secret to Learning How To Forgive

Learning how to forgive others is one of the hardest things to do. Jesus could do it. But can we?

We have all been hurt. Some worse than others. Many more than me. We lack confidence too. Some days we seem to soar with confidence, but all it takes it seems is for one wrong thing to happen and we are ready to give up or fall apart. You see, the problem, I finally figured out, is that we forget who we are.

I am a child of God. God accepted me into his family. I am a son of God. And my value, my worth, comes only from my relationship to Him. Sometimes we forget. My true worth as a person does not come from being so handsome :), and it does not come from my net worth. My value as a person does not depend on the car I drive or the house I live in. It does not come from the family I was born into. It is not connected to being smart, or my job or anything like that. My true worth does not come from who I am married to. When you finally look closely, it boils down to this. I am a child of God. The trouble is that we forget.

We hear the TV talk to us. The TV talks to us constantly, one show after another, day after day after day. It talks to us about revenge, getting even, about being enraged. The TV tells us all the wrong things. The TV tells us to demand certain things from people, like respect and fair play. The TV tells us to seek other’s approval. The TV tells us all the time we should be enraged over this or that and this or that should not be tolerated. The TV lies to us. Not realizing that and taking our eyes off God, his acceptance, His love and His plan for our life and putting our attention elsewhere, we set ourselves up to be hurt.

Sometimes we are insulted. Someone has something ugly to say about us. Sometimes our critics have ulterior motives. An old proverb from India goes, "Some men try to be tall by cutting off the heads of others." They try to make themselves feel better by making others feel bad. You have probably had the experience of being put down by a nasty remark. When that happens, it is easy to forget that others are broken just like us.

Jesus understood that people are broken. No one knows us like He. He forgave the tax collectors. He forgave the prostitutes. And he forgave even Peter for betraying him. On his last day he forgave those who killed him. He knows we all are weak. And he stands ready to forgive us all.

Forgiveness. How do we let it go?

The answer is in trusting God. You trust God for salvation, don’t you? We have to trust him to make things right when we forgive. He will heal our wound so we can move on. We have to depend on Him instead of ourselves.

It is almost against our human nature. But it is the secret of the Christian life, and the secret to forgiving. We just have to trust God. It sometimes can be hard. But is it certainly not complicated. It is the only way to forgive.

SPECIAL MESSAGE FOR YOU
I have made mistakes. Some much bigger than others. To all of you who were hurt by my mistakes and chose to forgive me, thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. To any who still have lingering hurt over somthing I did or said, I am sorry.  I am truly sorry and I hope you can forgive.  If we need to talk about it, I would welcome the opportunity to speak to you face to face and ask your forgiveness.

To all who have hurt me at one time or another, today I forgive you. Today, it is over. All is forgiven. Nothing more needs to be said or done, as far as I am concerned.  I forgive you and that is that.  The slate is clean. Everything I was holding on to, I have let it go, and God took it away, far away, as far as the east is from the west.  May God bless us all.