Have you ever walked around with such a chip on your shoulder and anger/resentment in your gut that you wished another person ill will? Have you ever watched another person be so filled with hurt and frustration that it bothered you to be around them? What I’m describing happens to a lot of people and it is something they completely bring on themselves. This is not a good way to go through life. It’s not good for you or for the person you’re holding a grudge against. Life is too short to walk around angry all the time. I find that this approach becomes contagious and begins to impact many other facets of one’s life. We start to become cynical, negative and develop a pessimistic outlook. It becomes easier to blame others and not take responsibility for our own mistakes. I believe it steals away joy, passion, and perspective.
If you stru
ggle with this, I encourage you to do some self-examination. Living like this is like a self-imposed prison or worse yet, it’s like taking poison and hoping the other person gets sick. Life is so much better when we have peace and harmony with people in our lives. Work toward restoration, forgiveness and stronger relationships. Some of the best relationships are the ones where two people have figured out how to be authentic and resolve their issues. We’re being naïve if we think there aren’t going to be problems in our relationships because everyone has issues!!! So, instead of internalizing these things, get it out in the open and resolve them. And please do NOT use facebook to vent .
Another thing to consider so you can hopefully give more people the benefit of the doubt is “hurt people, hurt people.” I love this phrase because we have to understand that life can be hard and when people get hurt, they react out of their pain and of course, they’re not at their best during this time so they say or do things that hurt others. We must be mature enough to understand human behavior and how people act after being hurt – if you’re the recipient of this pain, don’t take it personally. Try to see beyond it and love the person through their pain. The more we try to do this the better person we’ll become because this is not easy, but it’s a whole lot better than living in self-imposed prisons.
I don’t know about you but I’d rather go through life giving people the benefit of the doubt versus hoping they get what they deserve. What about you….
