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Forgiveness - A Key to Support RaisingBelow is the start of an article that I published recently regarding a workshop that I founded and ran many years ago. The principles remain valid, and can be another key to unlock the flow of finances into your ministry. This article applies to those who have experience the tragedy of divorce, but can apply to most areas of forgiveness. If you find this key to support raising, and see how unforgiveness can thwart your fund raising efforts, be sure to click on the link at the bottom to read the whole article.
Life After Divorce Includes ForgivenessBack in the 1980's as a young man, I led a group of us that started a Divorce Recovery Workshop in my home town. Although my wife and I were young and had small children, as pastors on a large church staff we saw a huge need in our community. Along with a small group of divorced people, we begin to run this 8 week seminar twice a year. It built slow, but had great results with this success training. After a few years of hundreds of people that were touched by the seminar, we handed it off to an associate. In looking back there were many things that I could identify as reasons for the popularity and impact the work had, but this article will deal with one of the keys, if not the top key, that was discussed and implemented that set people free. The topic of the lesson that contained this key was forgiveness. We discussed forgiveness and laid a foundation of the many of the well known and taught aspects of this important principle in relationships: 1. Forgiveness is an act of the will - not an emotion. Most of the time we need to forgive because we feel hurt. With hurt emotions we usually do not feel like forgiving someone, but it is vital we choose to do this - both in our hearts, and where appropriate, to have a discussion with the person we need to forgive. 2. Forgiving when you don't feel like it is NOT hypocrisy. If you claim to believe in forgiveness, then it would be hypocritical NOT to forgive, regardless of how you feel about it. Hyprocrisy is acting contrary to your beliefs, not going against your feelings. 3. You must choose to forgive, whether you think the other person deserves it or not. We are not talking about being a wimp, or letting people walk over you - but recognizing how vital your choice of forgiveness is for your mental and spiritual health. So - here is the key that set so many people free: In almost every situation where conflict or hurt feeling occur, it is truly rare that one person is either completely blameless - OR - one person is 100% to blame for the situation. So - in our workshop we instructed the divorced person simply to pick a percentage as a number that they felt they contributed to the failure of their marriage. We didn't mean the actually filing of the divorce papers - many people don't want to end up divorced, but they do - but the actual blame they would accept for the things they did or didn't do that led to the deterioration of the relationship. We had them write down a number between 1% and 99% that they would give themselves that they felt they were responsible for in the breakdown of their own marriage. The could choose any number - except 0% or 100%. For a few this was hard, but almost everyone that went through our workshop was able to pick a number.
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