Word for the day: "We heal Ourselves"

Genesis 50:17 (NIV) This is what you are to say to Joseph: I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly.’ Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father. ” When their message came to him, Joseph wept.When you forgive someone for hurting you, you perform spiritual surgery inside your soul; you cut away the wrong that was done to you so that you can see your “enemy” through the magic eyes that can heal your soul” says Theologian Lewis Smedes. So we must detach that person from the hurt and let it go, the way a child opens their hands and lets a trapped butterfly go free. I know, “easier said than done” but we have to one day at a time heal ourselves from this hurt and forgive, in the text Joseph wept when he forgave his own brothers for the wrong they’d done to him. This is some powerful stuff!What I have discovered is as we forgive people, we gradually come to see the intimate truth about them, a truth our hurt blinds us to, a truth we can see only when we separate them from what they did to us.  When we decide to heal our memories of the hurt we are not playing games, we are about handling our business in God. We gain a new insight and see the truth again. For the truth about those who have hurt us is that they are weak, needy, and fallible human beings. Does this make sense sisters and brothers?They were people before they hurt us and they are people after they hurt us. Yes they were needy, selfish, and weak before they hurt us and still needy after they hurt us. Therefore we can either let them go free or hold them hostage and be prisoners with them in our minds. They needed our help, our support, our comfort before they did us wrong, and they still need it now. I know you think I am out of my mind today?But forgiving does create a momentum that, left unbroken, can carry a healed person back to the one who wounded them. I am just simply saying there is still hope for a new beginning, the place where we who are separated come together again by the will of God. Think about it “We heal ourselves” what are you waiting for? Yes you may have to weep over it, but don’t let that stop you this day!Elder Baker