The Way of Being Lost by Victoria Price

Author:Victoria Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2018-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

The years that followed—my early twenties—were the hardest years of my life. Literally. A few years after coming out to my mom, I began experiencing a profoundly disturbing physical sensation: I felt something in my heart, something physically hard. It seemed to get harder and harder.

Until one afternoon, I was listening to a Joni Mitchell album in my car and suddenly tears filled my eyes and my chest welled up in pain. For the first time in twenty years, I began to cry!

As Joni sang about the crocuses she would bring to school tomorrow, tears came pouring out of me—and with them an almost unbearable ache in my heart for my dad and the sweet memory of my elementary school days when he sent little pots of crocuses with me to put on our classroom window sill so my friends and I could watch them grow. I realized how much I had been missing my dad—ever since my parents’ divorce. The tears that had been hidden away for so long that I had forgotten they were even there finally flowed, foreign and unfamiliar in all their tender sorrow.

I remember watching myself cry as though I were in a movie of my own life, thinking, as I wept with both discomfort and relief, Ahhh. So this is why people cry.

As my tears fell, that stony place in my heart began to release. Over time, I gradually became “normal”—someone who cries at movies, sappy commercials, relationships ending. Yet my mother’s voice continued to remonstrate me for feeling sorry for myself.

Then I discovered the actual meaning of the word “sin.” Rather than some edict from on high, it is an archery term meaning to miss the mark. Realizing that, everything shifted. The only mark we can miss is to choose fear instead of acting from Love. Whenever my mother acted from fear, she missed the mark of Love. When I followed in her footsteps, so did I. Neither of us could fully open our hearts because both of us were afraid we were sinners. All either of us had ever needed to do to save our souls was to crack our hearts open to Love. I began to learn how to open myself up to tears despite her childhood teachings to the contrary, but some of her other thorny life lessons were more difficult to extricate.

We can never truly love until we learn how to forgive. But we can never truly forgive until we learn how to love. Now, thirty years later, I cry often and deeply—but it wasn’t until I learned to forgive that I began not only to weep tears of joy but also to find joy in my tears—the tears that finally washed us both clean.

In order to fully step into my daily practice of joy, I knew I had to finally release myself from her sentence of sin. That meant I had to release her too. I needed to embark on a journey of forgiveness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.