This wonderful short story came my way and it got me to thinking. What makes love, specifically, forgiveness so hard for some folks?
Well, read the story and then we’ll take a look at that question.
A story tells that two friends were walking through the desert. In a specific point of the journey, they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face.
The one, who got slapped, was hurt, but without anything to say, he wrote in the sand: “TODAY, MY BEST FRIEND SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE”.
They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who got slapped and hurt started drowning, and the other friend saved him. When he recovered from the fright, he wrote on a stone: “TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SAVED MY LIFE”.
The friend who saved and slapped his best friend, asked him, “Why, after I hurt you, you wrote in the sand, and now you write on a stone?”
The other friend, smiling, replied, “When a friend hurts us, we should write it down in the sand, where the winds of forgiveness are in charge of erasing it away, and when something great happens, we should engrave it in the stone of the memory of the heart, where no wind can erase it”
To answer the question posed above…we switch things around! Instead of writing the hurts in sand where they can be easily washed away by rising tides of our best intentions, we write them in stone making them last, sometimes even a life-time! We then take the blessings of our lives and write them in the sand of ‘easily forgotten.’
Why is this, why would we have this inclination and preference for the negative in our life to last longer than the positive? I believe it’s because we have not made a fundamental decision to see and seek the best in life and in others. As for seeing the best in our self…that is probably the challenge of all challenges.
The decision to be an optimist, to find the positive in EVERYTHING is not an easy one to make especially if pessimism and negativity was our norm as we grew. You grow a seed in soil that is unfriendly to its needs, you will not reap the best and sweetest fruit. It’s just a fact.
Human beings thrive in an environment of love and positive energy; anything less and you will get a less or under-developed person. Now the beautiful thing about being human is the built-in capacity to change course and develop more of what we need to thrive and blossom.
We are made in the image of an abundant and ever-loving God. We can ALWAYS turn toward our highest and best self; we can always make a decision to be a positive and optimistic person finding the best in our self and in others and remembering those things that nurture our soul and forgetting those things that do not.
So I encourage you to keep sand things in sand an stone things in stone: Write your sorrows and hurts in sand and your blessings in stone.
God bless you.
Wishing you an abundance of optimism and love,