I’ve recently been listening to the lyrics of the songs and I believe that some of the lyrics of the songs, not everyone, but some of the songs that people write are inspired by Spirit.
One of the songs that comes to mind is “The Colours of the Rainbow”, red and yellow and pink and green; because it says in the lyrics “listen with your eyes, listen with your ears and sing everything you see”. How marvelous is that?
I think a lot of us go through life and we don’t open our eyes to what is around us. You know we can get from A to B and all we see is the pavement, or we are just tunnel visioned; so the lyrics are very good.
I want to speak to you this evening about forgiveness.
I was having a conversation at the place of my work with one of the residents, I work in a care home, and they were going on about everything that’s happening in the world and everything we hear on the news about all these ‘terrorists’ or people attacking each other people, or all these atrocities happening across the world; and she was saying that she really couldn’t stand all these people who were doing these atrocities and it came to me; forgiveness is something that we all need to learn, because they say ‘forgive and forget’, but i think forgiveness is a lot easier than forgetting.
The reason I believe this is that we aren’t supposed to forget because the things that happen to us in life, as some of you may already know, are lessons that are put in our pathways in order for us to learn, because this life is a school of lessons, a school of learning and we never stop learning as we go through life. Many different things will come into our pathways.
Now some people say, if something very bad happens to them, how can I forgive? But the thing I am being told is that when you hold on to this anger in yourself, the only person who is suffering is you. The other person, the person who may have done you wrong, or the situation, doesn’t suffer at all. It’s only within ourselves that we may become stressed, we may have a lot of anxiety and we can even make ourselves ill.
So forgiving, as i say, is not forgetting because we need to hold onto that but when you learn to forgive you then learn to strive forward. A lot of these lessons in life anchor themselves to our belts and it’s like trying to walk across Southend beach with these anchors attached to us, dragging along in the sand. It slows you down, you are not going to get anywhere fast.
But to forgive a person, or situation, allows you to release that anchor, it allows you to move forward, and the main thing is from these situations is that you do learn the lesson. It’s no good someone sending you in the wrong direction, you learning that lesson but not retaining that information and then somebody else sending you down the same pathway. All that is going to happen is that you are not going to get to where you need to get to. So by learning the lessons, you learn that sometimes people may give advice to you, but you don’t need to take that advice. You have free will to do what you want to do.
And another hard thing in life: forgiving others is fine, but can we forgive ourselves? Because that is very hard and that can weigh heavily on everyone’s’ shoulders. There are times in life where we feel we may have done wrong un-to others, and when we think about that it is a burden to ourselves, so as well as forgiving others, we also need to be able to forgive ourselves.
Another thing that happens when we hold these grudges, and we don’t forgive, is that we are constantly looking back over our shoulders. These situations are things that do hold us back and don’t allow us to move forward; and then we may not go in to a situation because of something that has happened to us. We may have had a bad experience, with an ex-partner or job; or we may not have done our best in a situation, and then what happens is we come up against the same situation or a similar person and we look back and we remember what has happened to us in the past. It’s like riding a bike, when you begin to ride a bike you have to persevere, if we said to ourselves every time we fell of that bike that we weren’t going to get back on, then as you know you would never learn to ride a bike, or you would never learn to swim, or you would never learn to achieve your goals in life.
I think it was Thomas Edison who created the lightbulb and someone once said he had 10,000 or so attempts at creating a lightbulb.
Another Scientist said to him “how do you feel about failing 10,000 times?’
His answer to that was: “I didn’t fail 10,000 times, I just learnt 10,000 ways of not doing it correctly”. And that’s a great thing to have within your thoughts because if you dont allow these things to hold you back then you can attempt to do it. It may take you three, four, five times, but you will move forward.
So I will leave that with you but if you can take that with you in your heart, to think about forgiveness; because it is something that holds us back in life and does stop us from moving forward.
God Bless
This is a transcript of a Spiritual address given by Gary Colcott during our Divine Service on 21st January 2018, at Thundersley Christian Spiritualist Church.
