Forgiveness

My friend sent me this picture today. It almost made me cry. It's now the background of my phone.

I have HUGE issues with forgiveness. It doesn't take me long to forgive others, but when it comes to forgiving myself, yeah right. It took me 2 1/2 years after I stopped cutting in high school for me to forgive myself. I was at a Steubenville youth conference in Atlanta when God finally gave me the grace to forgive myself. I haven't stopped cutting, so right now, me forgiving myself is almost out of the question. I have to quit first. I asked Fr. Greg once why it's so hard for people to forgive themselves and he told me it's because people don't understand God's forgiveness. Then he challenged me to go to Confession weekly for the next year. If you don't know this by now, I trust Fr. Greg more than almost anyone. Therefore, I'm going to do my absolute best to do it. So far, so good. This past summer, he asked me to go to Adoration everyday for 30 days and he promised I'd be changed. He was right. I did it for all 30 days, even though at one point things got REALLY bad. I almost quit going because I was so angry with God. So what I did was I went for like 15 minutes a day and let God hear it. I was so angry that a lot of times I would start to cry. I told God how angry I was at Him, I asked Him how He could let all this crap constantly come back in my life, etc. After 30 days, things did get better. That's why I'm open to weekly Confession for a year. It might sound like a lot, but I really know it's not. Fr. Greg told me I had to be open to God's grace if this weekly Confession is going to work. I'm doing my absolute best to be as open as possible. Forgiving myself is just not something I'm good at. Fr. Greg said that as soon as I feel God's forgiveness, I'll be able to forgive myself. So, I'm giving this a shot. I guess we'll see where it goes.

"Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future." -Lewis B. Smedes