The Sands of Forgiveness

Today's post is borrowed (okay - stolen) from Mutual Love, one of my newly discovered treasures in the sea of blogs. I was visiting there and found this post. It was so touching that I decided I really needed to share it here, too. (I seriously hope the writer of Mutual Love does not mind my thievery...)

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Two friends were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face.

The one who got slapped was hurt, but without saying anything, wrote in the sand:

Today My Best Friend Slapped Me In The Face.

They kept on walking until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who had been slapped got stuck in the mire and started drowning, but the friend saved him.

After he recovered from the near drowning, he wrote on a stone:

Today My Best Friend Saved My Life.

The friend who had slapped and saved his best friend asked him, "After I hurt you, you wrote in the sand and now, you write on a stone, why?"

The other friend replied "When someone hurts us, we should write it down in sand where winds of forgiveness can erase it away. But, when someone does something good for us, we must engrave it in stone where no wind can ever erase it."

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Now for my own thoughts...

It's very important to model this type of behavior for your children. Teach your children how to forgive those things that are not worth carrying around. Extra baggage of anger and resentment weighs us down and makes it more difficult to see the joys in life.

As parents, we also need to learn to write our parental hurts in the sand of life. When our children "hate" us or reject us, we need to realize that it is all just a part of growing up. They don't truly hate us (at least for the most part).

Sand and stone - how completely opposite of each other.