forgiveness and belonging.

Loneliness kills. I don't say this to be dramatic, it's a scientific fact. According to the American Psychological Association, recent research has shown that being isolated presents a greater health risk than obesity, and can lead to an earlier mortality rate by 50%.

Being in community matters. 

We know this, as people. We were designed to be connected, to belong. It's one of our earliest longings, to be held and comforted by someone safe. We desperately want to hold on to this feeling. But somehow, as we get older, it becomes harder to grasp. 

We lose ourselves in the process of living. 

Maybe it was the pain of a broken relationship, or maybe you were the one doing the breaking. Maybe it was both. Regardless, we find our way to being alone by default or by choice, and allow the distance to numb us out until we no longer feel vulnerable. 

We protect ourselves from the inside out, and yet our souls are crushed by the heaviness of our armor.

And so we find that loneliness kills more than our bodies, but our spirits, long before it is our time.

I am finding for myself that forgiveness often precipitates belonging. Brené Brown states in her research that in order to belong to others, we must first belong to ourselves. Turns out that it's very hard to be open to acceptance from others when you cannot accept yourself. It's also extremely hard to be gracious towards others if you can't be gracious towards yourself. 

We must be champions of self-compassion.

If you are like me, you may think that the key to becoming a better person is to challenge and poke and prod and punish yourself in the right direction. So many things about American culture reinforce this, not to mention our sense of religious obligation. Many of us grew up in the rhetoric of the church that taught us very well how to be very ashamed, and emphasized a sort of spiritual self-masochism. 

I find this a dangerous dichotomy, this splitting of good self and bad self, this fear of our darkness and this lack of a genuine understanding of grace.

Listen, in order to love yourself, in order to accept who you are where you are, in order to find that belonging that you yearn for with every fiber of your being, you must understand that we are all capable of bad things.

Which means that you are also capable of good things.

Sometimes, I think, we get stuck feeling like we should just be good no matter what. We like to think that the world doesn't shape us, that all our pain and suffering doesn't go into what comes out of us, that we are OK despite the fact that very little in this life does not contain at least a sliver of ugliness.

But the truth is, we ALL have the capacity for both good and evil.

And beating ourselves up more, shoving our own faces in the dirt?

Punishing only leads to purgatory. 

So.

We must forgive. 

And part of forgiveness is acknowledging that we have done things we are not proud of.

It takes a lot of strength and a great deal of courage to look our demons in the face.

But more than this, it takes love.

We must we must we must be rooted in love to forgive, both ourselves and others.

We must know our own value, our own worthiness to truly stare down our darkness and take hold of the light. 

Grace requires that there be something to forgive.

And forgiveness can only be found when we tend to what has been broken, both inside and outside of us. 

We have made mistakes, yes.

We have damaged and destroyed and been promoters of our own self-harm.

I know it's scary to think you could be something different, something good. I know it feels untrue to believe that you aren't the sum of your shadows, that forgiveness feels like you are letting yourself off the hook for all the violent storms you've created.

I know. 

But grace, oh grace. Grace never starts with punishment. 

But it is capable of driving out fear.

Fear of ourselves, of others.

It's strongest in the face of adversity, failure, and shame. 

It can bring us out of isolation, if we let it.

It can propel us into belonging, but we have to let it in.

We have to acknowledge that our search for wholeness is directly linked to our ability to forgive ourselves, our ability to accept love in the places we feel the most unworthy, the most broken down. 

And to do that we have to face our pain. We have to recognize our own propensity for hurting.

And we have to allow ourselves to heal.

To take a deep breath, kneel down towards our suffering and say, 

"I forgive you. You are loved. This is not who you are, won't you come into the light?"

In my years of working as a social worker for men recovering from homelessness, the most successful clients I worked with were those who had a solid understanding of forgiveness in light of what they had done. Some had messed up in big ways like murder or violent crime, some in other ways like substance abuse or unhealthy relationships. And I will tell you, that the clients who had messed up the most were the ones who also loved the best because they had no choice but to face their struggle and forgive. Their lives literally depended on their ability to show compassion to themselves in the midst of their own suffering and the suffering they had caused. They knew that if they wanted to transform, it had to start with love, not hate. 

They had accepted that they had not been and would never be perfect, but loved themselves anyway.

We have all done and will continue to do bad things, yes.

It's human nature, after all.

But.

We don't have to stay there, and we don't have to keep reliving our own versions of hell.

Face it.

Forgive it.

And show yourself the compassion that God himself has shown you all this time.

Remind yourself of who you are despite of what you've done.

Because the truth is, all that kindness you are showing yourself? 

It multiplies as you open up to others.

We cannot belong to others until we belong to ourselves. 

And we cannot belong to ourselves until we forgive.

Don't waste another second of your precious living on imprisonment anymore.

The truth about who you are is waiting for you.

But you must be free to accept it.