A couple of weeks ago in Sunday school, I was talking to the Confirmation class about baptism. We were discussing how you have to live your baptism every day by believing you start with a clean slate, as far as God is concerned. I pointed out that, once you get to be my age, you have lots of things you need to be forgiven for, but the hardest thing is to forgive yourself.
I don't think I could single out one thing for which I need to forgive myself. Generally speaking, I'm still working on offering forgiveness to my 18-to-22-year-old self, who made a lot of dumb decisions that I can hardly bear to think about as an older person. There are any number of explanations for why this happened, but the bottom line is, I made those choices. Plenty of people around me were making smarter decisions--I was just too lazy and selfish and generally immature to do the right thing, much of the time.
Fortunately, after I'd moved across the country to go to graduate school, I outgrew those traits very quickly. When you're completely on your own, you learn that being a person others respect is pretty important--you can't expect much from them if they aren't able to expect much from you in return.
1 comment:
I really enjoyed this post. Just thought I would let you know!
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