Category: Lord’s Prayer

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forgiveness Lord's Prayer

Forgiveness Part Three

As Forgiveness parts one and two both started with a photo of my dog I felt that I had to start Forgiveness part three with the dog even though this picture has no relevance to the post 🙂

So Sunday we did Forgive us our Sins as we forgive those who Sin against us in youth group.

I used the “sin” translation because SIN, I was told years ago and it has stayed with me, comes from an archery term that means “missing the gold mark at the centre of the target.” So really sin/sinning is just missing God’s mark rather than trying to work out what we’ve done wrong. We “all have sinned and fallen short the glory of God.” We’re not bad people, we’re just human and cannot make God’s mark day in day out and I think God finds that ok.

Something I feel I was taught wrongly though was that Forgiveness is conditional. I was taught that God would only forgive me if I forgave others. Now I’m not so sure. Surely if that were the case then that makes God’s love conditional when in fact God’s love is unconditional. God’s love is not based on anything I do, say, don’t do, don’t say, think, don’t think, behave, etc. God thinks I am awesome no matter what. And if is from that basis that I am safe to forgive others.

I watch it with the children I now work with in after-school club. Those who are in a secure place, who trust that we as their play-leaders like them, or from homes where they know they are loved, are much quicker to say Sorry to a fellow after-school club friend than those who don’t feel so secure. It isn’t whether they are or not but how secure they feel in that.

We are all loved unconditionally by God but some of us believe that more than others. As Paul says though that shouldn’t make us want to do more wrong things. In fact that security makes it easier for us to say sorry and try to “hit God’s mark” more often. As one of the young people in the youth group said, because God forgives us it gives us a second chance to make mistakes. I love that. That assurance that we are free to make more mistakes, rather than fear that some adult Christians have that if God forgives them then they shouldn’t make that mistake again.

One of the amazing things that we see if we read the about the life of Jesus is how ready he was to forgive. Not to forgive when that person was sorry, when they forgave others, when they were even ready to be forgiven but to just forgive because that is what true love is.

Some of the last words Jesus says whilst dying horribly on the cross were

Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing

Luke 23:34

These people he was forgiving were jeering him, gambling for his clothes, generally pleased that he was gone. Not at all repentant and asking for forgiveness. Yet Jesus still forgave them with his dying breath.

There is a selfish reason why we should forgive. Not so God loves us more because that is a given. But we should forgive because it is better for us. It is a proven medical fact that people who truly forgive are healthy, happier, live longer, and are more open to the changes in the world around them. They are not fearful, not anxious, and are ready to let others into their lives. Check out what the Mayo clinic says about the power of forgiveness

And if you fancy reading more check out the book “The Body Keep The Score” to see more, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before.

Neither of these things might be Christian per se but they seem to advocate very clearly the importance of what Jesus was teaching in that line in the Lord’s Prayer.

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forgiveness Lord's Prayer

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a dog sitting at the top of the stairs looking cute waiting to be hugged after he has just trashed the couch and put all the cushions on the floor!

In my last writing group I ran only one lady turned up. Her and I have known each other for a while so we got chatting about more than just writing. Slowly it emerged about how forgiveness, of ourselves for being hurt as much as for others who have hurt us is important.

In fact Jesus says in The Lord’s Prayer

Forgive us our wrongs as we forgive those who wrong against us

[paraphrased]

So we are asking to be forgiven as much as we are asking to forgive, I think. There will be follow up post to this in May after we have done these phrases with the youth group because we all know these lovely young people seem to get to the heart of things.

But as we chatted I thought more and more about how can we understand forgiveness. So I set the challenge with the lady, which I am also going to share with my writing group mailing list for making Forgiveness some solid, giving it a personae, a personality, making to tangible. I think too often we try to understand abstract concepts but we need to make them whole and real.

For me forgiveness if a warm friend, but not the sort of friend who agrees with everything you say but who challenges you when you tried to get round things. I have a couple of friends who are like that. I’ll get into moan mode and they’ll got “yes I see where you’re coming from but have you looked at it from this side.” Now to me that is forgiveness. It doesn’t say you’re wrong but it says you have to move on.

This picture I saw on Facebook this morning says it all for me. Forgiveness is the challenging friend who says “let it go, you don’t need to carry this. Get off the track”. I did also discover that as well as forgiving I need to put in something more than to make it move from an empty forgive to a positive space. Perhaps I need to explore whether forgiveness walks alone or has a friend?

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Lord's Prayer wisdom youth group

Just Do It

Blurred picture of a white egret in flight over Conwy Beach as the tide recedes on spring day. Photographed by Diane Woodrow
Egret flying over Conwy Beach Saturday 18th March 2023 Photographed by myself

Last Sunday I was leading the discussion for our Church youth group. We are working our way through The Lord’s Prayer. [If you go back through some of my posts you will see I am a bit “into” the Lord’s Prayer] This week’s couplet was “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

As always the young people are much less religious than adults and have reach a point of trust with me and my co-worker so they aren’t saying what they think we want them to say. There were some great things that came out of them about the closeness of God’s kingdom and the ease of doing God’s will.

I will paraphrase one girl but it was the bit that stayed with me. She said something along the lines of “God’s will being about trust and if we trust God then we can just do it, just go out and believe that God will make what we do God’s will.” Basically trust that what we feel in our hearts is God’s will. Too often we get into weighing up and judging and then disbelieving, sitting back, not doing.

Of course there are things we should not do, things we should run by those we love and trust – and that means we do need people in our lives that we can be open with and trust with our dreams, our desires, our hopes. So I suppose firstly we need to build up those people around us.

But at the same time as doing that we need to build up the trust in our own hearts. I am getting more and more to a point where I trust my heart and am aware when I’m not “feeling it”.

With these words of this wise thirteen year old girl in my head and a feeling in my heart that I had a space that needed filling in my day I went on Indeed to job hunt. I wasn’t overly serious because I had set myself quite firm criteria – children/young people and afternoons. Well up popped an job in an after-schools club in my town. I scrolled on past but couldn’t get it out of my head so in the end applied. I’ve got the job. I start next week. But when I was at the trial afternoon I felt my heart settle for being there, felt that it was a safe place that I was going to for the right reasons.

Then yesterday I was telling the vicar I co-run the youth group about the job and about how much this girl’s words had impacted me and I realised that this job was totally of God. It stops me from taking on too many things because I will be tied to work every afternoon but also if I want to write I won’t be able to do much during the day. I do have a couple of commitments but that is ok too.

So I did trust my heart, trust that my heart was hearing God/the Universe’s will for my life and I “just did it” and then it appears that I was given a reassurance that I had done right.

So yes it will be tough fitting everything I want to do in to my morning, and will be odd being committed every afternoon and only have weekends and holidays to roam randomly. But that doesn’t mean it is wrong to do. In fact it all feels very right.

Sometimes we do just have to trust and do it

Photo by Lucas Allmann on Pexels.com
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Faux Pas Lord's Prayer

Faux Pas

Desolation and lone footprints. Photographed by Diane Woodrow
Footprints across a deserted beach taken by myself March 2022

Why is it that it is so much easier to remember one’s mistakes and faux pas than one’s triumphs?

Yesterday I was chatting with a fellow writer and something slipped out of my mouth that I did not mean to say. He was a bit irritated by it at the time but I apologised and the conversation resumed. All the way home in the car I was waiting for my friend to say something about the gaff I’d made, but she never did. All she wanted to do was talk about the serendipity of being in the building at the same time as this person she knew through other outlets. And we twittered on about how amazing life can be, etc, etc.

But still when I was out with my dog walking I could feel the embarrassment of it. As I pondered by reaction rather than what I’d said I realised that it was actually my autonomic nervous system [ANS] that had gone into fight/flight/fawn/freeze mode and I needed to calm down my “meerkat” panic.

So as I walked I pulled my ANS back into a calmer, relaxed place via things I’d been taught via QEC – telling my ANS to realign – which is just says “ANS come back into alignment“, repeating “I’m safe, you’re safe, we’re safe” thus convincing my subconscious that there was nothing to worry about, and also being grateful – for the encounter with the fellow writer, for the time with my friend in the car there and back, for the joy of walking my dog. By the time I got home I was calm.

Even as I write this I can feel myself laughing at what I said, because it was daft and out of order, but I do not feel that awful grumpy-dragging-me -down-ness that I have felt in similar situations before. I can see it as a mistake I made and that I have learned from but not an “end of the world” thing.

It has made me wonder how many times I may have not done something, or even done something, because I was in that heightened “meerkat” mode – fearful, hyper-alert, anxious – rather than acknowledging it, taking those breaths, realigning myself and being able to let it go. Because that is very much what I did – let it go.

It also made me think of the lines in the “Lord’s Prayer” – about forgiving and forgiveness. Too often we are ready to forgive others but how often do we forgive ourselves. Or even how often do we say “Lord, forgive me my trespasses” but we are not willing to do it ourselves – thus making us bigger than God???

So as I realigned myself, stepped out of my fight/flight/fawn/freeze mode, I also forgave myself for what I’d said and have been able to get on and do things – which today have involved sending a proposal for some work and entering a writing competition. I have moved on from my faux pas!

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Lord's Prayer Trust God

All About Titles

maize field in the foreground, a row of conifer trees then rolling hills and onward to Snowdonia national park. Sky is cloudy with patches of sunshine. Taken by Diane Woodrow
Looking into Snowdonia. Taken by myself on 16th August 2021

So I will end this run of four thoughts on The Lord’s Prayer at the beginning “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name” I’d love to do a straw poll and find out how many of us cringe a bit when we feel we have to call God Father. I know my hand would go up. I’m not just thinking of my own father but of many other fathers I know who struggle along trying to do the best for their kids but carry so much of their own baggage that they don’t really know what “Father” actually means.

So I start my prayer by saying “To the all loving being who inhabits both the heavens and the earth, who made it all, and all that it is in it, whether the created acknowledge their maker or not. To the connected universe that holds all together and lets all move freely. To you I open my heart today because you are immense and amazing.”

Ok so it is a bit more long winded than the words we read in the Bible. But again I think that is because, for the gospel writers, it was obvious who they were connecting with, and obvious what they and others believed and expected.

In my journey with God I have come to see prayer more and more as not an asking thing but a connecting thing, and so I have to ask myself “what or who am I connecting with?” which is why I have the long opening. It is for me and not for God. God knows who God is. God doesn’t need telling, but I do need to realise the enormity and amazingness of God.

I think often our prayers are for ourselves. So we pray for those we love because it helps us cope with what they are going through. Yes I do know and believe that God answers prayer and intervenes. I also believe that God intervenes without our prayers too. I know prayer is important. But I think we often do it for our peace of mind too. And I believe that when we connect with God, the Maker of the Universe, through prayer or mediation or centering, or whatever we want to call it, then we connect with something higher, wider, deeper, more all knowing than we are.

To gain the real amazingness of prayer we need to also trust that we connect, that we are heard, that we are part of something, that we are co-creators of the outcome. Even if the prayers aren’t answered as we would like.

I like stories to confirm things so … I offered to pray for a lady in the park because her father had been taken ill. Her father died two weeks later. She told me that she knew I was praying because she felt such peace through it all. I didn’t give her peace. I didn’t stop her father dying. But what I did was connect her and her father and her family with The Amazing Power and Peace of God and let things flow as they were intended.

The outcome isn’t my call. My call is to prayer, connect with my Heavenly Savoir, and trust that things will go as the Universe believes to be the right way with peace.

I have to end by saying I think prayer is amazing and I need to remember to do it more often during the day as it changes me and my energy as much as it changes things I pray about.

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God's Kingdom God's Will Lord's Prayer

Connected Wills

Picture of a wall and a shingly beach, looking across a stretch of water to Anglesey and the town of Beaumaris. Taken by Diane Woodrow
From Abergwyngregyn nature reserve looking towards Beaumaris. Photo taken this morning, 16th August, by myself

My third day of thoughts on my version of The Lord’s Prayer. Today is “your kingdom come, your will be done” to this I always add “in my life and my world.”

Is this a selfish, egocentric attitude? I think it depends on how you view yourself and your connections. For me I see myself as connected to others who in turn are connected to others. For instance, lady in the park told me that the random conversation we had the other day, which brought back memories of her going to Paris with her late husband, made her day and that she was able to cope with a shop assistant who was a bit stressed. I didn’t even meet the stressed shop assistant but my connection with a fellow dog walker supported that shop assistant. And who knows what the kind words from the from the dog walker brought to the shop assistant and so on and so on

Also I am coming to believe more and more that the energy I give out – whether negative or positive, fearful or safe, joyful or angry – affects those around me and again then affects those they come into contact with. It is a bit like my understanding of chaos theory – of how a butterfly flapping its wings in a forest can lead to a hurricane somewhere else in the world! OK for all the scientists who follow me this is a my simplified version!!! 🙂

Maybe me being kind to people and doing my best to walk with an energy of trust, peace and joy, can lead, one person at a time, to peace in the Middle East, which if boiled down to its basic level is people being afraid of people and what they can lose.

I suppose this comes full circle back to believing I have enough, which can even lead to knowing I have lived long “enough” as have those I love. [Of course I don’t want those I love to die in pain but I have to be ready to let them go when the universe says “enough” on their time here – but that’s for another blog!!!] But if I believe I am living in “enough” and that I am walking out God’s Kingdom and Will in my life/my world, then I do not need to fear lose or fear getting it wrong, which brings me back to “Forgiveness” of myself and others.

Makes you wonder sometimes if the Lord’s Prayer was written upside down and should have started with “get ready to forgive yourself and others, trust there is enough to go round, and believe you are doing your best to work out God’s Will and Kingdom in your life and that this will affect others”.

Just a thought!!!

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forgiveness Lord's Prayer

Letting Go

Reeds round the edge of local Abergele pond blown flat by a storm. Photo taken by Diane Woodrow
Reeds blown over in a storm at my local park. They were all standing up right the following day. Very much a bruised reed he will not break. Photo taken by me July 2021

So to carry on with my thoughts on how I am praying The Lord’s Prayer at the moment.

The reason I’ve picked this picture is that when we judge ourselves and so don’t forgive ourselves, we are like these reeds; knocked over, lying flat, struggling to function. But, if we tune into what I believe Jesus is trying to tell us in The Lord’s Prayer, we will recover, stand up again, and be all we are meant to be.

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” we recite. I need to forgive me before I can forgive you. Jesus talks about judging others and being judge, which I think goes with this. And it isn’t God judging us or not forgiving us, but ourselves. I don’t believe I follow a judgemental God but I do believe that I can be a judgemental person.

Here is a trivial for instance of me being judgemental. I used to judge what people were wearing so if I had to go out with the dog when I was still in my pajamas [he won’t pee in the garden so sometimes if he’s bursting he has to be rushed to the small patch of grass at the end of our road] I would be convinced people were looking at me and judging me for being in my pjs. I’m not sure anyone noticed or cared. But it did mean when I went out I was often looking at what people were wearing, but now I’ve stopped looking at what people wear and judging whether it is the “right” thing to be out in, and so this morning when I had to rush the dog out I didn’t think what anyone would think of me.

But also the “forgive myself and forgive others” thing is also that if I can’t forgive myself for screwing up I am not able to forgive others for it. So in my morning post-yoga praying I adapt this line “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” to “help me to forgive myself through today as I screw up, which I know I will, and help me to be kind to others who will also screw up, upset me, hurt my feelings or generally do something I don’t like. Help me to keep short accounts and keep my heart open to knowing when I’ve not forgiven myself and also have allowed someone else to upset me” It is all a bit long winded and I can see what the gospel writers shortened it. But actually for me I see the lines in The Lord’s prayer as almost like journal prompts to lead me to something bigger and deeper.

Also starting the day like this means I do spend my day being able to forgive others quickly because it is already in my head.

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enough Lord's Prayer

Enough

Trees fluttering and dancing in a light breeze last Sunday afternoon. Taken by Diane Woodrow
Dancing silver birch trees in my local park. Taken by me 8th August 2021

Enough! How often do we start our day believing we have had enough sleep and will have enough time to do all that we think we have to do during the day? Very rarely I would say.

Too often we wake thinking we haven’t had enough sleep – especially if we are menopausal women who have restless nights, or have babies that keep us awake half the night or more. We then look at our “to do” list and think we don’t have enough time.

For me this contentment with “enough” comes from Brene Brown’s “Daring Greatly” book, QEC coaching and also really praying the Lord’s Prayer after doing yoga most mornings.

The “give me today my daily bread”, for me, can only come from a place of “enough”. But that was not how I was taught this prayer. I was taught it from a place of “lack”. A place of begging God to “please give me my daily bread”. Believing that unless I really asked God properly I wouldn’t have enough to make his Kingdom purposes come!

I have now started praying “help me believe I have all that I need, my daily bread allowance, to do all that I am meant to do today” or “thank you that I have already got all that I need for all that I will be doing today” or “I start today grateful for the daily bread I have been given for my day.”

It is a knowing that I have already been supplied with “enough” for today; whether that is energy, time, patience with others, grace, food, etc. Even those I meet will be part of my “daily bread” for today; people who enrich me, that need me, that I need, that help me and I help. All are part of my daily bread. And I come from knowing that I have enough to give and to receive all through the day.

It also means that at the end of the day when I’m tired and don’t feel like doing the washing up and can’t read as many pages of my book as I would like that is ok. I’ve done my “enough” for today and it is ok to curl up and go to sleep. I can end my day feeling grateful for what I did and knowing it was all that I was meant to do for today.