This week, Carol Merlo, M.Ed., reviewed A Forgiveness Journal on her blog, which focuses on health and wellness. In fact, she called it “A Must Read”! You can check out her review at theeightkeystowellness.com.
As my virtual book tour starts to pick up steam, I’ve had the opportunity to “stop” by a couple of blogs this week.
The first was at the Keener Financial Planning blog, where Jean Keener talked about how forgiveness can help you with your financial life, especially in this down economy. My article, Forgiveness: 5 Reasons It’s Good for You was also posted to the blog.
Then, today, my pastor posted a review of my book at the Sunflower Chalice blog.
Chaos Theory offers striking parallels to the spiritual life. Chaos is the last state a system goes through before it dissolves into completely random behavior that represents the demise of the system. In a mathematically chaotic system, there is underlying order. You can observe the order inherent in a chaotic system - but only when you step back and view its wild permutations over time and from a multi-dimensional view. From chaos can emerge a reformed system that is stable and stronger than what was previously. Fractals, the beautiful hologram-like patterns created by graphing the mathematical iterations of a chaotic system, illustrate the order that becomes apparent only after time. The picture on the left is an example of a fractal and can be downloaded as a screensaver from Tech Republic.
There is a life lesson in the behavior of chaotic systems. There are phases in life in which chaos seems to reign supreme, typically caused by illness, crisis, financial devastation, death of a loved one, a dark night of the soul or depression. Comfort comes from realizing that our lives are passing through a chaotic state in which order, hidden from plain sight, beckons from the viewpoint of a wide-angle lens. You use that lens when you step back from the present hardship and contemplate it in the context of the bigger picture or the fractal pattern of your life. Frustratingly, the wide-angle lens takes maturity and sometimes the lapse of time before you can see through it clearly. Indeed, sometimes that viewpoint is never accessible via human understanding.
Forgiveness demands that you use a wide-angle lens. This is why it can takes years - even decades - for an individual to to forgive and become free of his or her past. It may take that long to be able to discern the order underlying chaos, to view the hurt and the pain you experienced through a wide-lens, to see it in the context of a bigger picture. Be patient. Just because you are interested in forgiving means that you are already taking steps toward that goal.
Your life is a fractal image of order within chaos. It oscillates between phases of seeming chaos and order - yet inherent in the chaos is order, and within order is the possibility of chaos. The trick is to hold onto faith in both chaos and order. For me, the order is Source’s promise to me that there is an underlying purpose, beauty and promise. There is safety. As the Psalms say:
“Thou dost beset me behind and before, and layest thy hand upon me.
Whither shall I go from they Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from they presence?
If i ascend to heaven, thou art there! If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me, and they right hand shall hold me.”
-Psalm 139:5, 7-10
For more information on chaos theory and how it relates to business and life, please refer to Margaret Wheatley’s book, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World.
This past week, I stopped by the Planting God Communities blog managed by Rev. Ron Robinson. His post talked about Letting Go of the Past, Forgiveness, and Planting. He even talked about William Faulkner! Good company to be in, I think.
Have you been laid-off or fired from your last job? Are you looking for work and not having much success? Standard advice to job seekers includes updating the resume, attending networking events, calling your contacts, etc. What is seldom mentioned is the need to work on forgiving your last employer or manager who laid you off. Without fully processing your anger and resentment toward your last job, company or boss, you will have a hard time convincing a new employer to hire you.
What happens if you are lucky enough to get an interview and you are still full of bitterness toward your last manager? Even if you don’t say something overtly derogatory about your last job, your resentment will be felt on an unconscious level by the interviewer. What interviewer, in a very tight job market, wants to hire someone who is full of negative emotions? In a recession, employers have the pick of the field in hiring, and will almost always choose a candidate who exudes confidence, forgiveness of past employers and a broad perspective of market conditions and human frailty.
During a period of unemployment, your time would be well spent in working through your feelings about how and why you were terminated. Writing down your deepest thoughts and feelings is a good way to extract them from the inside closet of your mind and apply them to paper. In that way, your analytical brain can process them, see patterns, gain perspective and forgive the past. Forgiving yourself will be part of this process for those who feel some responsibility for losing their job.
For how-to advice on forgiving, please refer to my book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, found at www.aforgivenessjournal.com
The virtual book tour for my new book, A Forgiveness Journal: Letting Go of the Past, is now underway. Last week, I “stopped by” The Women’s Business Gallery. Carma Spence-Pothitt, the owner of the site, promoted my book and discussed how forgiveness can help you break through barriers that might be holding you back in your business.
You can see that the stops on my tour are starting to fill in. They are regularly updated on my official Virtual Book Tour page, as well as in the sidebar of this website.
If you would like to participate in the tour … there are some perks, including the chance to win a copy of my book, as well as being spotlighted on my webistes … just contact my assistants at info@brioleadership.com.
