Archive for March, 2014

Just Checking in Regarding Your Unfolding Love Story

In January of this year, we posted a reflection here in which we encouraged you to grow in love as your legacy of 2014.

The challenge was this: Give love away as your legacy of 2014.

One way to start is by looking backward at one incident of 2013. Please think of one incident with one person in which you were loved unconditionally, perhaps even surprised by a partner or a parent or a caring colleague. Think of your reaction when you felt love coming from the other and you felt love in your heart and the other saw it in your eyes. What was said? How were you affirmed for whom you are, not necessarily for something you did? What was the other’s heart like, and yours?

It is now about two months later. Can you list some specific, concrete ways in which you have chosen love over indifference? Love over annoyance? If so, what are those specifics and how are they loving? We ask because 2014 will be 25% over at the end of March. Have you engaged in 25% of all the loving responses that you will leave in this world this year?

Tempus fugit. If you have not yet deliberately left love in the world this year, there is time…..and the clock is ticking.

Robert

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Forgiveness Protects the Victim from Further Pain

Communities Digital News (CDN), Los Altos, CA – Matthew Boger was just a teenager when he found himself living on the streets of West Hollywood in 1980 after having been thrown out of his home for being gay. Because of his sexual orientation, he was brutally beaten one night by a group of neo-Nazi skinheads, including Tim Zaal, who had attached razor blades to his boots prior to kicking Boger in the face and leaving him for dead.

It was shocking that Boger miraculously survived, but even more shocking is what occurred 28 years later when the two happened to meet again by chance in, of all  places, the Museum of Tolerance in downtown Los Angeles. What followed is an unimaginable journey of forgiveness and reconciliation, an improbable collaboration, and a friendship that remains to this day.

Their unusual but heartwarming story has now been told in the movie “Facing Fear” which has been nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Documentary Short Subject.”

“The words [he said] and what I saw were far more painful throughout my life than the boots and the blades,” says Boger. “I knew the only way I was going to get past it was to forgive him.”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I could forgive somebody the way he’s been able to forgive me,” Zaal says in the movie.

As the film demonstrates, forgiveness is one of the best tools we have to protect ourselves from further pain, mentally and physically. And as Boger and Zaal’s remarkable example illustrates, the capacity to forgive is not just a nice add-on but can be and should be an indispensable element of our personal and societal well-being. It is also an innate, if latent, quality of thought that can be taught and nurtured.

Read the full story: “Oscar hopeful ‘Facing Fear’ turns spotlight on power of forgiveness.”                          

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