If I were to rank yesterday on a scale of 1 to 10, I don’t think it would even reach the scale to be measured. To say the news we got yesterday was not good would be an understatement.
Within a matter of about three minutes, I received bad news about three people close to us.
We received news of a friend of ours being shot to death in his home country in Central America.
I used to coach ice hockey and I was fairly good at it. My teams would consistently beat teams that were significantly older and more experienced than us.
I once took over my son’s baseball team mid-season after the coach fell ill. Up to that point, the team was at best a .500 ball club. After I took over, the team began to win nearly every game and we eventually made it to the league championship game only to lose by a run or two. We did this despite my knowing absolutely nothing about baseball.
What caused these teams to be able to win?
As fathers of daughters, we have always held the role of Daddy. We were the Protector – the one she ran to when she scraped her knee, was scared of the monster under her bed, or when things just didn’t go her way.
But now she’s getting married and our role as Daddy the Protector needs to change. There’s a new Protector in town – her new husband – and we need to learn to adapt and love our new role.
Robert Wolgemuth provides words of wisdom and guidance to help fathers (and mothers) navigate in these unfamiliar waters.
While I was standing at my front door this morning looking outside I spotted a little moth flying around. The sun was hitting its wings at just the right angle to light it up and made it look like it was iridescent. I don’t know why this caught my attention but I watched the moth for a minute as it just fluttered around.
And then a bird swooped by and ate the moth.
It made me start to think about the moth and the fact that he was just floating around, maybe going somewhere – maybe going no where in particular, but just floating around minding his own business. And along came the bird and the moth was history.
At this moment, while I sit here writing, I cannot think of one thing that I have done that the memory of makes me feel resentment towards myself. Sure, there are things that I have done that were hurtful to others, but for the most part I have realized my actions may have caused hurt, tried to learn from my actions so I won’t repeat them, and asked for and received forgiveness for my actions. From this, I have been able to move forward in my life without carrying a lot of guilt and self-resentment.
In my original post “Choosing Forgiveness”, I discussed how to move forward in your life and cut the ties that bind you to someone who has hurt you through learning to forgive that person. Now it is time to look at ourselves and try to examine what internal baggage we might be carrying around that we need to be able to free ourselves from by choosing to forgive ourselves.
Many of us have done things in our lives that we might not be happy with ourselves about. Have you been the one to cheat on a partner? Have you been the one to break a promise you made to yourself or another person? Do you beat yourself up over the fact that you didn’t say something to someone before it was too late or that you did say something that you could not take back and now you regret it?
