Dear Ones,
Hope you had a wonderful 4th of July weekend! Al and I enjoyed being at the lake with about 30 relatives.  We finished our picnic about an hour prior to a storm hitting with lots of wind and rain. The rest of the time the weather was lovely and we played lots and lots of games, had my brother and wife for Finnish pasty, and 11 of us went to church together yesterday. Today I definitely need to get to my exercise class after eating so much!
Devotions from Judy’s heart
Sometimes when hurtful things have been done the person will say, “O just forget it! No big deal!” But if they have been offended, it’s good to allow them time to deal with their feelings rather than trying to bury the pain before acknowledging it. Let us remember we can’t bury something until we acknowledge that it exists in the first place.

Christians are good at covering up hurts, thinking we are more spiritual if we ignore an offense and get over it quickly. But that is not a recipe for good health of body or soul. We must remember that forgiving someone is one thing, but forgetting takes time. We can forgive immediately, but only God can forget right away. Somehow, we have gotten the notion that we haven’t really forgiven unless we quickly forget as well. But that is not so, for they are two different things. We all may still have some negative unforgiving feelings for a while after we have forgiven a person. Dr. Martin Padovani reminds us that forgiveness is a decision, a choice and an act of our will and intellect. It can still be genuine even when we don’t have warm, positive feelings, as we are saying with our will, “I forgive you.” But the feelings of forgiveness may take some time, for we don’t have control over our feelings but we do have control on how we handle them.

Let’s say someone has hurt us and we have anything but warm feelings towards him. We feel the pain and there are some resentful feelings still in our mind, but we don’t act on them. We don’t have to be hard on ourselves and feel guilty, but give ourselves time to get over it and not overreact. We are to be gentle with ourselves and trust that in time our heart will heal, and we may have good feelings towards the person in the future. In the meantime, we treat him respectfully and take time to reason and reflect. Suppressing our anger only makes things worse.

Challenge for today: Deal honestly with anger, for appropriate anger is a virtue and Jesus practiced that!
Blessings on your week and prayers and love, Judy