I am no saint.

(photo courtesy littledan77)

I have behaved badly and hurt people deliberately.
In seeking out love I have too often driven it away.
I am as flawed as you can get.
I am all too human.
But it is the divine in me that seeks to be just a little bit better, just a little more open, just a little more forgiving of myself and others, just a little more patient with myself and others.
It is the nature of the journey on this planet to make what we think of as mistakes; to hurt ourselves and others. To look for love in all the wrong places.
But how else do we grow? How else do we deepen our connection to ourselves, each other, and the divine?
Empathy and compassion and the power of forgiveness come only from having experienced the wound.
As Yeshua says, what better healer for the lost and wounded than those of us who have been lost and wounded. And who have inflicted those wounds as well.
It is a deepening of the human experience.
We cannot hear the cry in others if we have not cried out ourselves.
The journey to the Divine is through the human.
It is a hard, hard road.
It is pain within pain within pain. It is the road from the illusion of separation to the truth of connection.
We have not fallen from grace, but we have journeyed to those places where grace is often forgotten.
But love is never lost. It is never beyond reach. It is as close as the next breath. It is the next breath.
It is the next thought that offers that it takes great courage to accept our flaws, our wounds, our fears. And those of others.
And in that thought is forgiveness offered, is grace restored.
I am no saint.
I am not supposed to be.
I am supposed to be conscious.
I am supposed to be present.
I am supposed to open to the possibility that I am -- that we all are -- deeply loved and that we have just forgotten that.
That through our stumbling, we learn to walk.
In forgiving ourselves, we forgive the world.
In forgiving the world, we are restored.

Peace, Bradley