What's in your harbor?

We go through life making many connections, some true intimate friendships, and some get to experience a lifelong romantic relationship that's hopefully committed through the covenant of marriage.

It really is amazing that we were made for interconnectivity. Connection is one of my favorite things about life and interaction with others. I've always been a people person. I love making others smile, spreading love, sharing joy, and helping others heal, transform, and discover themselves and their purpose. Connecting with others is an innate need, and having intimacy with a select few confidants in life is both a blessing and a treasured challenge. You see, connection with another being at the core comes with a condition that many see as a caviat.....

In order to have that type of connection, you have to be vulnerable.

Many people who like to be in control of their lives, who like to have the power and option to pull out of things if needed, do not like vulnerability. Vulnerability requires the relinquishing of control. It means "I'm letting you in where you can, and most likely due to your imperfection you will, hurt me. It's saying to another person, "I choose to trust you." (and those of us who are believers and followers of Christ understand that this really means "I choose to trust the God in you, knowing that you must submit to God in order to be operating in the Spirit ,which means me no harm.")

It's all about faith.

Once we take that step where we are vulnerable, we bond with someone on a very deep, tender level then we can experience an authentic connection that has the potential for growth opportunities, pure transformational love, and challenges to the core of our beings. It is powerful. It is beautiful. It can be the most scary thing we experience.

Sometimes those people do hurt us, and we have to decide whether to be vulnerable again or to close up, whether to forgive or to feed strife, whether to live in freedom from the actions and offenses that hurt us or to enslave ourselves in the prison of our mind's resistance to overcome and rise above. It is a difficult, heart wrenching, earth shaking experience and decision, but in the end.....unforgiveness only hurts the offended.....

We think, in the childish mindset that offenses provoke, that by not forgiving our offenders, we have some kind of power over them or that we are withholding something that they want, when in fact..... We take the seat of the offender in our unforgiveness. The one we end up having power over and withholding from is ourselves.....

Forgiveness is always the first step to healing from an offense. Forgiveness says "I release the offense so that what needs to escape me and what needs to reach me both have free passage." Think of it as a harbor. When it is operating in functionality, vessels come and vessels go. There has to be a flow of traffic. If it is full because there are too many vessels anchored there in the harbor, nothing can get in. Also, anything that needs to leave cannot get out. So.....forgiveness clears vessels from that harbor by sending them on their way.

Think of those vessels as offenses. One boat over here is the friend that let you down and disappointed you, not meeting your expectations. That yacht over there is the parent who did not protect you as a child and let something traumatic happen to you. That ship next to it is the spouse who was unfaithful. That cargo ship behind the boat is full of all the exes who didn't see your worth and mistreated you. And because of the flawed condition of human beings and a innate need to connect, the vessels just keep on coming BUT it is your choice whether or not they congest your harbor or come and go as they should. You have the power to release them, and remember.....the person who sent them your way has nothing to do with the reason why they are still sitting there anchored in your harbor.

Let them go.....