White Paper

I am reading a book about healing through love. Letting go of pain, and loving others, as the key to better health. I was telling my friend Kristie about it, and then was imagining what would happen if you could let go of this pain by checking into a hotel with a roll of white freezer paper and some Sharpies and spend a day writing down all the emotional baggage you carried in the form of wounds that other people had caused you. Then, I thought, knowing something of God, that it wouldn't be long before you started writing down the wounds you had caused others. Friendships that you had let die, promises and hearts you broke. When you have lived a long time, the clean white paper would quickly fill up with dreary reminders of others and our human failings, our lack of empathy, our neediness, our cruelty. After all the tedious writing, you could forgive yourself and those that needed forgiveness and start new. My smart husband thinks there is a better way to purge the past and move into the future. He thinks it would be better to write down the characteristics that you want to own, and then ask God to show you how to own them. That way, the person of hope and peace and joy would always answer in love and find true healing.