This is a prayer for myself and anyone else who wants it:)

I thank you, God, for the ability to forgive and the gift of forgiveness. Until recently I couldn’t forgive no matter how I went about it, not sure why, but I presume it had to do with the hate taking all the space available in my heart leaving no room for anything else, including forgiveness or joy.

Thank you for breaking that hard calcified wax of hate towards others and myself and melting it away from my soal. Now I have room for forgiveness, love, and joy. Now I can forgive myself and others; sure it’s still an effort, sure it’s still my will and choice but I have the power to choose now versus being stuck within my sick soul with no way out except a continuous and exhaustingly constant squirming and no progress other than fatigue. I earnestly thank you now for giving me the parents I have, for bringing me to this part of the world, for my family, and for giving me the body I have. What tremendous spectacular things I’ve learned because of these privileges and what great privileges I have to help others.

Thank you for waking me up to my potential by revealing to me my fears, fears that captured me in a self-restraining smuggled dark suit all these years. By showing me these fears and their consequences, you opened up the eyes of my soul to the things I’ve missed and the opportunities not taken if choosing to remain in that snuggled dark suit called fear.

I will choose life, love, and joy. I will risk opening up and be vulnerable in order to gain these three qualities. I will re-learn and re-direct my focus, thoughts, and behaviors in order to experience the consequences of life, love, and joy. In my quest, I will fail sometimes but I will get up and continue because my focus has shifted. I finally see that I have the right to experience life, love, and joy, a right you gave me a long time ago but was taken away by other’s fears only to be recently recaptured.

It’s a re-learning process based on the truth that what others said or did in order to keep me down was based on their own insecurities and fears, not mine. Their walls, not mine. I thank you, Father God, for opening not only my eyes but my soul as well to accept this, for acceptance is the bridge between success and failure. In the past, I’ve accepted false versions of someone’s truths and it brought nothing but a vast desert in my soul, now I will accept your truth to choose life, love, and joy. After all, that’s the definition of balance. Not one without the other, not one over the other. Balance. Truth. This time your truth and let’s see what that brings along and where will it end.

Amen.