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    40 Graces for Forgiveness: a Healing Journey
    40 Graces for Forgiveness: a Healing Journey
    40 Graces for Forgiveness: a Healing Journey
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    40 Graces for Forgiveness: a Healing Journey

    By Maria Keffler

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    About this ebook

    '40 Graces for Forgiveness: A Healing Journey' chronicles a 40-day meditation on forgiveness as it relates to the character of Christ. Spending ten days each considering gifts of the Holy Spirit, attributes of Christ, personal attributes which are in opposition to Christ, and Christ’s walk to the cross, 40 Graces for Forgiveness: A Healing Journey follows the example of Jesus as he lived in holy relationship with others. Through forgiveness like his, we learn to become true disciples of Christ: those who do what he did. If you’ve found forgiveness a struggle too, this study may serve as a helpful launch pad for your own path toward healing. As we strive to walk out the words of the Lord’s Prayer—“forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”—we find freedom to be who God made us to be, and to do all we were created to do.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMaria Keffler
    Release dateFeb 1, 2019
    ISBN9780463466773
    40 Graces for Forgiveness: a Healing Journey
    Author

    Maria Keffler

    Maria Keffler lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband and three kids who all wish they were only children. She blogs about things like tarantula-milking lawyers and the savagery of familial relationships at www.wastingmyeducation.blogspot.com, and is presently learning how to cook without the smoke detector finding out about it.

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      Book preview

      40 Graces for Forgiveness - Maria Keffler

      40 GRACES FOR FORGIVENESS

      A Healing Journey

      Maria Keffler

      * * *

      Copyright © 2017 by Maria Keffler

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. If you did not purchase this ebook, or it was not purchased specifically for you, please return to Smashwords to obtain your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.

      For permission requests, please contact the author as indicated in Connect With Maria Online in the back pages of this book.

      * * *

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Thank you to all the people who encouraged me and who suggested I collect these meditations into a book for the encouragement of others: especially Melanie Sunukjian, Abigail Knutson, Martha Ferguson, Sally Schlatter, Christy Sanborn, Abbey Swanson, Nanette Ladd Allen, and Peg Balliet. Thank you to everyone who follows or reads Wasting My Education, and graces it with their own wisdom, insight, and counsel. But most of all, thank you to God for loving me so much that you are never satisfied to leave me the way I am.

      * * *

      DEDICATION

      To anyone who ever offended me,

      and to the many I’ve offended,

      without whom I wouldn’t have needed to do this.

      What Satan means for evil, God turns into good.

      * * *

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      INTRODUCTION

      DAYS 1-10 The Fruits of the Spirit

      FORGIVENESS

      LOVE

      JOY

      PEACE

      PATIENCE

      KINDNESS

      GOODNESS

      FAITHFULNESS

      GENTLENESS

      SELF-CONTROL

      DAYS 11-20 Some Attributes of Jesus

      HOLINESS

      JUSTNESS

      MERCIFULNESS

      MEEKNESS

      WISDOM

      SOLITUDE

      COMMUNITY

      PERFECTION

      SONSHIP

      KINGSHIP

      DAYS 21-30 Some Attributes of Me

      BROKENNESS

      SELFISHNESS

      VENGEFULNESS

      SELF-STRENGTH

      FOOLISHNESS

      ISOLATION

      LOVE-STARVATION

      MEDIOCRITY

      ABANDONMENT

      ADOPTION

      DAYS 31-40 The Walk to the Cross

      DISCIPLESHIP

      LAZARUS

      THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY

      THE CURSED FIG TREE

      BETRAYAL

      SILENCE

      PETER’S DENIAL

      DEATH

      THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

      RESURRECTION

      About the Author

      Other Books By This Author

      Connect With Maria Online

      * * *

      INTRODUCTION

      Welcome to my healing journey.

      I realized (a while ago) that unforgiveness is a problem for me. Memories of things that happened years or decades ago still float around my mind, or linger in my mouth with a bitter aftertaste. So I decided to embark on a series of meditations about various aspects of Jesus, and how they might inform my understanding and practice of forgiveness.

      It’s been a wild ride.

      If you want to follow along with me on my journey, eavesdropping on my conversations with myself and God, I’m happy to have your company! But if a lack of forgiveness is also an issue in your life, you may want to consider embarking on your own healing path.

      This study, or meditation, or shoulder-overlook is for you. Use it however you like.

      Each day opens with a reflection on some aspect of forgiveness, followed by a pertinent scripture, and then a daily prayer. I’ve included a few thought prompts for your journaling time as well. If the questions spark something in you, fantastic. If not, write—or muse, sing, paint, choreograph an interpretive dance, or do whatever you do to work through stuff—anything that helps you mark the passage from here to there.

      Blessings and love to you as we all long to become more like Jesus.

      * * *

      DAYS 1-10

      The Fruit of the Spirit

      What better place to start than with the nine fruits the Holy Spirit cultivates in a believer’s life? Am I blooming all of these? Any of these? Could unforgiveness survive their constant, daily activity?

      On FORGIVENESS &

      LOVE

      JOY

      PEACE

      PATIENCE

      KINDNESS

      GOODNESS

      FAITHFULNESS

      GENTLENESS

      SELF-CONTROL

      Day 1

      FORGIVENESS

      One of the things I desperately need to give up is chronic pain. Not chronic physical pain, but chronic emotional pain, the kind that comes from hanging onto old, inflicted wounds with two closed fists.

      Forgiveness is the key, I’m told.

      (I’m told that a lot.)

      And I believe it. Yet forgiveness never seems quite able to clean house all the way.

      That’s probably because I haven’t allowed it to get in the corners and under the furniture and into the backs of the cabinets. I let forgiveness give pain ‘a lick and a promise’, as my grandmother used to say when she didn’t have time to do things the way they should be done, so she did just enough to fool the neighbors if they stopped by.

      So, over these next 40 days I’m going to let forgiveness have its way with me and my house. I’m going to practice forgiveness not as some esoteric vapor that floats around my head for a few minutes when I’m feeling especially spiritual, but as the practical, daily outflow of becoming more like Christ.

      I’m going to start the first quarter of this journey asking what the Fruits of the Spirit mean to forgiveness, then spend the next ten days looking at forgiveness through the character of Jesus. The third ten days I’ll examine the mess of me and my unforgiveness as it’s juxtaposed against the perfection of Christ. For the last quarter of the journey I’ll try to let Jesus speak to me of forgiveness through his approach to the cross and triumph over it.

      Feel free to pull up a chair.

      For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. – Matthew 6:14-15

      (Prayer) Today I commit myself to the practice of forgiveness. I want to release every anger, grudge, vindictive memory,

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