Forgiveness vs hate Forgiveness is a warriors strategy. If we hold on to past injuries, real and imagined, those injuries kick our asses over and over. If we forgive the offending party, we reclaim our energy, retrieve our fractured soul fragments, empower ourselves, and enable ourselves to move forward. Forgiveness is the difference between winners and losers. Losers cling to old injuries and grievances and disempower themselves. Winners extend forgiveness, recover lost energy, empower themselves, empower others, and move forward to victory. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, a concentration camp near Wupertal came under allied control. The newly liberated prisoners, many of them Jews from Holland, France, and Eastern Europe, were suffering from the effects of slow starvation. One of the prisoners was known to the allied soldiers as Wild Bill Cody. He was called that because he had long drooping handlebar mustaches, as did the old western hero, and his real name was difficult to pronounce. He was one of the inmates of the concentration camp, but it seemed obvious that he hadnt been there long: his posture was erect, his eyes bright, his energy indefatigable. Since he was fluent in English, French, German and Russian, as well as Polish, he became a kind of unofficial camp translator. The allies came to him with all sorts of problems; the paper work alone was staggering in attempting to relocate people whose families, even whole hometowns, might have disappeared. But though Wild Bill worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day, he showed no signs of weariness. While the rest of the soldiers were drooping with fatigue, he seemed to gain strength. We have time for this old fellow, hed say. Hes been waiting to see us all day. They were astonished to learn when Wild Bills own papers came before them one day, that he had been in Wuppertal since 1939! For six years he had lived on the same starvation diet, slept in the same airless and disease-ridden barracks as everyone else, but without the least physical or mental deterioration. Perhaps even more amazing, every group in the camp looked on him as a friend. He was the one to whom quarrels between inmates were brought for arbitration. This was a rarity in a compound where the different nationalities of prisoners hated each other almost as much as they hated the Germans. As for Germans, feeling against them ran so high that in some of the camps liberated earlier, former prisoners had seized guns, run into the nearest village and simply shot the first Germans they saw. Wild Bill was a great asset, reasoning with the different groups, counseling forgiveness. One day Wild Bill told his own story; We lived in the Jewish section of Warsaw. he began slowly, my wife, our two daughters, and our three little boys. When the Germans reached our street they lined everyone against a wall and opened up with machine guns. I begged to be allowed to die with my family, but because I spoke German they put me in a work group. He paused, perhaps seeing again his wife and five children. I had to decide right then, he continued, whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really. I was a lawyer. In my practice I had seen too often what hate could do to peoples minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life - whether it was a few days or many years - loving every person I came in contact with. From Return from Tomorrow by George Ritchie An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Whining makes really bad Karma .... ~ An Anonymous Biker Mystic Adapted from Change the Paradigm
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 23:53:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015