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Who are you who do not pray for the strength that God will give you?
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Who are you that do not love yourselves?
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Your children are an extension of your hopes and your frailties.
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If you do not show them mercy, then you have no mercy for yourself.
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This is why the spiritual fact is the way you treat others is the way you perceive and show your own worth to the world.
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This is why as you show mercy, so shall you be shown mercy and at the very least your bad behavior shows how you feel about yourself.
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At the worst, it can cause you to become uncivilized, even worse than an animal, a monster.
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Forgive yourself for being human, for being less than perfect.
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Forgive those that made you feel bad or small because they expected something from you that was not humanly possible. The ones that expected from you what they themselves were lacking simply because it is not possible to be perfect.
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Rid yourself of the delusion that life is a contest or a test. Life is life and is to be lived in the moment at the pace you were created to live it.
mercy
Back to School!
I remember so many things about starting a new school year. It meant I was finally going to get new shoes to replace the ones I long outgrew with the holes and sometimes cardboard placed in the soles. I would get a few pieces of clothing as needed and since I was the oldest, no hand-me-downs, even though my little sister was physically larger than myself. Some of the clothing was hand-made by my mother or grandmother and did look homemade. Sometimes my grandma had enough savings to take us to Federal’s Department store for a dress or two, my dad had more important things to spend his money on when he was working. I can’t remember where we purchased our shoes. I didn’t really care about the actual school supplies, it made me nauseated to look at them!
It meant I had to brace myself for another year of bullies and mini-aholes. The “popular” kids with all the right clothes and all the right words. The teachers that were supposed to be teaching me, but never saw me, or pretended not to. I was the plain little mouse that looked out-of-place in the homemade clothes and one long braid down past my butt. It was worse than being Amish, I was poor. When I was very young, we were only allowed one bath a week, whether we needed it or not. When we got to live with grandma, we were cleaner. So dirty, poor, oddly dressed, you get the picture.
I could never concentrate on the menial subjects my teachers were always blabbing about. You see, I found it much more compelling to wonder if there was going to be any dinner tonight. If my ghost of a father would stumble home after we went to bed hungry and decide that we needed to be punished for being born. My teacher would try to pry my brain away from my true life of poverty, abuse and neglect, to a world where 2 + 2 actually equalled 4. Did I care at the time? Hell, no! After a good beating for no reason I would worry for days about what evils awaited me that evening. I knew that I could be as good as gold and still not be safe. I heard of spankings and punishments and knew, the older I got, that bad kids were punished, not good ones. That’s why it took me so long to believe. To even be able to comprehend things such as a Holy Father, because mine was evil. Forgiveness, because I had never known mercy and to give, because I had nothing to give anyone, not even myself.