some new favorites

Design Milk (this is a link to the eco-friendly stuff)
http://www.sfgirlbybay.com/
Design*Sponge

and

a petri dish of American spending

forgiveness

Last Sunday in our College class we talked about forgiveness. I’m pretty sure I’ve sat through countless Bible studies on forgiveness, but for some reason, this time I felt like it was something I needed to hear. I used to think I was a forgiving person. Probably because I was easy-going enough to let people walk all over me if it would be more convenient to avoid conflict. And if someone actually did do something to hurt me, I would just tell them it wasn’t that big of a deal. I would let people get away with things that would hurt me. Then at some point in my life, I stopped letting that happen as much, at least with people in my life that I truly cared about. Instead, I’d stew, tell my best friend(s) about whatever had happened that I felt so wronged about, and if the grudge ate its way through enough, I’d finally confront whatever the issue was until I felt resolved about the whole thing. But, this isn’t very healthy either. Because, let’s be honest, I’m not always really healthy, and definitely not always perfect. And usually the confrontations ended up being overly analyzed or overly emotional and were probably more detrimental to the friendships than anything else.

So I sat through the hour or so that we talked about forgiveness and evaluated what I’ve been doing to myself and others over the past few years. And I wasn’t too impressed. We talked about how to move past the abstract “love everyone just like Jesus would” answers to how to actually deal with real people and situations. For example, do you continue being friends with and interacting with someone who repeatedly hurts you? But you see, that’s where I get all confused. Because it’s still abstract, and it’s still situational. Are they hurting you on purpose, or unintentionally? Could what you perceive as an injury be something that may actually help you, or even heal you?

Because what I want out of my life is healing. Not just healing for some specific thing that happened to me, or some conflict that I want resolved, but habitual healing. I’m trying to discover what that looks like. Maybe that looks like keeping my mouth shut instead of telling every interested party what I’m upset about except for the one person I need to talk to. Maybe that means just lettings things slide and having lower expectations from time to time. Maybe it means letting some friendships go and trying harder at others. It’s time for a fresh start.

{ps: I applied for a graphic design position with NFIB last night. Small business political lobbying, here i come! ehh...kind of.}