fore.giveness

Today at church I heard a talk that had me scribbling in the margins of an old handout so I could remember what he was saying.
It gripped my heart and had my mind reeling to process the words, the truths and the beauty of it.
The talk was on forgiveness.

He started with an analogy of a chemical plant that had a pipe that put waste into a river and had another pipe in the same river to bring water into the plant for energy.
Normally there are problems when a company puts waste into a river (pollution) and whether it be through taxes or laws or whatever, they try and prevent pollution being caused by the chemical plant.
However, if the plant puts their own water in-put pipe downstream from their waste out-put pipe, they are likely to solve on their own the problems that would arise from pollution.
They don't want to in-put polluted water into their plant.

So it is with forgiveness and choosing to not take offense. If we forgive people in the first place, we solve our own problem of carrying a heavy heart.

Most of the time we take offense because of FAE- fundamental attribution error. We consistently make up stories about people linking their faults to their personalities. We tell ourselves that we know their intentions, and they are bad people. We tell ourselves the girls in relief society who are whispering, must be talking about us; therefore, they are stuck-up brats. We tell ourselves the guy driving the BMW who just cut us off in traffic, is a rich, spoiled punk.

Whereas, we link our faults to our circumstance. We don't allow other people to be human and imperfect, but we make exceptions for ourselves.

If we give people the benefit of the doubt; if we let it go; if we consider forgiveness to be fore.giveness- doing it be.fore., we save ourselves the grief and heartache downstream when we refuse to forgive.

This man's story has changed my life. Watch this and it will change yours too.