Acceptance, it is a powerful word. It can mean the difference between love and hate, forgiveness and resentment, joy and despair. It requires courage because when we have learned to accept others we then need to apply that same acceptance to ourselves. It requires us to forgive, understand, and display a willingness to step outside of our selves enough to dare and believe that what someone else says or does is something we no longer need to judge.
It is easy to “say” we accept things then walk away and keep thinking the way we have always done. It is easy to say we love and accept until someone near and dear to our heart behaves in a way counter to our own value system. And it may seem easy to accept until accepting “that’ is contrary to everything we believe. Acceptance is never as easy as it sounds, it demands change in our hearts.
Acceptance means forgiving that one family member who refuses to live like we think they should live. It means loving that neighbor or coworker who wears us out every time we have to interact or work with them. And it means loving things about ourselves that will not change and no one else knows…the things we think make us unworthy or flawed. Acceptance means knowing and still loving, caring no matter what. When we can do that we can tackle and recover from anything.
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