Strengthening your forgiveness muscle is paramount in all cases. Whatever kind of emotional healing we need as human beings is rooted somewhere in forgiveness. If it's not forgiving ourselves, it's forgiving someone who hurts us. Forgiveness, like love, is our constant companion. In fact, forgiveness is an extension of love. Keep in mind that there are basically two emotions. One is love and one is fear. Forgiveness, as I said, is an outgrowth of love. Unforgiveness is an outgrowth of fear.
I recently saw a television program that really got me to thinking about how that all applies. The reason this might be important is that you are an extraordinary coach, and as an extraordinary coach, certain concepts you can do best by embracing, and the knowledge that your clientele may be experiencing some of these maladies like unforgiveness, should always be in the back of your mind.
The particular episode of this program I'm talking about involved a young man who was erroneously accused of two crimes. One crime was murder, and it was a heinous crime had he committed it. In fact, it was heinous even though he didn't commit it, but the person that did commit it committed a heinous crime. The other crime was being a child molester. Talking a little bit about the child molestation, the specifics of his case was that as a 17 year old boy he had sex with a 16 year old girl and was caught by the father. In an effort to avoid punishments from her father, she said she was raped. Now I know this topic is a little deep for a blog about coaches, but it begs a certain question: what sort of things do we have in our minds that impact everything else that we do? Stuff like this could be one of them.
As it turned out, the young man was innocent of the charge of murder. He didn't do it. And he was innocent of the child molestation as well. The woman who was involved in trying the case as a lawyer, went to the church in this community where this all happened and she tried to have them feel guilty for what happened. As part of her talk that she was able to address the congregation, she said that "you thought him a murderer and he wasn't. You thought him a child molester and he wasn't."
The point of this blog is that even if he was a murderer, even if he was a child molester, we are called to forgive him. By not forgiving him if he is guilty, we don't garner any great place in history because we didn't forgive a guilty person. Forgiving a guilty person is precisely why forgiveness was invented. By being wrong about him one way or the other, it makes sense to err on the side of caution. For your own well-being, for your own emotional health, you must become accustomed to forgiving. We as humans can justify all sorts of things, and believe it or not, we can even justify being unforgiving.
I want to point out that being unforgiving is nobody's friend. You can qualify it by saying that you will forgive but you won't forget. That statement, the words make sense and the words are understandable, but the truth is if you udder the statement "you can forgive but not forget," you haven't forgiven at all. As an extraordinary coach, let me urge you to always be on the lookout for things you can be forgiving about and to always be able to detect unforgiveness in your clients. It is my belief that no matter what else one does in life, if they are harboring any unforgiveness for any reason, they're not going to experience true healing.
As with this blog, I say to you: Has it helped you? Has it given you a new thought? Has it benefited you? Then I urge you to share it with someone you care about. I end this blog the way I end all of them, which is simply: have a good time until next time.
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