Challenge: Forgive Charity: C-R-Y Total £ accrued: £4 Status: Already struggling/Feeling unprepared
The Second Challenge: Forgiving
I hadn’t even thought of or prepared for this month as I was so focused on making it through last month as successfully as I could. So as soon as February arrived, I was suddenly struck with two main questions to my challenge.
1. What does Forgiveness mean to me?
I took to the internet to try to find the answer to this one and even though, being a Christian, forgiveness plays a huge part of my life and faith, I felt as if I barely knew anything about it. I found a number of helpful quotes but I chose two of them to base my month on. “Speak the truth to each other, because we are all one. When you are angry, don’t lash out, and don’t go to bed angry. Don’t use your words to hurt. Instead, speak positively so that your words can help when it is so necessary. Let go of your bitterness, hot temper, anger, arguments, cutting words, and hatred. Be kind, sympathetic & forgiving to each other.”
“To forgive is to let go of feeling hurt, to give up our grudges. To forgive means to extend goodwill to those that we feel are opposed to us, those who have offended us, those who have hurt us, those who don’t like us, even those we regard as enemies. Forgiveness is truly an act of self-transformation. When we forgive, we transform a negative mental state of resentment and anger into a positive mental state of goodwill.” So based on the quotes above my aim for this month will be:
♥ No Hate ♥ Letting Things Go ♥ Being Understanding ♥ Wishing Well But what if people find out about your month of forgiveness and take the piss? I’m so glad you asked (lol) because people have already been threatening to do exactly this! And I think to me this is possibly one of the main reasons for my struggle in letting things go. But I remember a quote I once heard, “Forgiveness doesn’t always mean reconciliation”. It is so important to know how to forgive but not necessarily reconcile, especially if you are dealing with damaging behaviour. If you are unsure of the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, I found this to be a good read.
2. How am I going to measure the success of this challenge?
Hard as it was trying to figure out what forgiveness meant to me, it was even harder trying to figure out how to measure it. One thing I knew for sure was I will probably struggle a lot this month – so I expect to raise a lot of money (yay for them, boo for me)!
As forgiveness is a lot to do with your state of heart, the beneficiary this month will be C-R-Y (Cardiac Risk in the Young). But it is also because my boyfriend, Ryan Goggin, is raising money for them by doing a crazy 2,663 mile hike (more on this later)!
This challenge will require a level of trust from you, my reader(s), as only I will know whether or not I have truly let something go, and sometimes you don’t even know yourself! So you will have to forgive me (see what I did here?) if I don’t get this right!
Like an onion, I think there are many layers to this challenge (it could probably make me cry too), and most of the time forgiveness is a journey that can take a long time. I want this to be challenging but I don’t want to be too hard on myself. Remember, forgiveness isn’t just for other people, it’s for you too. Sometimes it’s harder for us to forgive ourselves, and this will be part of my challenge.
So here is my challenge. Each day the aim will be to let go of grievances as they occur as quickly as I can. And the aim for the month as a whole will be to have let go of any long term grievances (things that happened before this month) and to be able to start a clean slate with every person (including myself). No hate, no grudges, only love!
Can I do it? Probably not, but it’s worth a go!
I still have no idea on the best way to measure it, I would say £1 per grudge per day but people piss me off so frequently that it could easily be £100 a day! So I’m still not sure but I may revisit this if the dolla is stacking big time $$$!