Let’s meditate….

Let us meditate on relationship healing. Recollect a situation where you felt loved, accepted, important, precious, known to people, and well sought after. It can be your own home, where you met together under a tree, or on the bank of a river or school place, or a meadow, or a garden as friends, or a teashop, or a church yard, or a prayer group, or a working place. Wherever it is, it is important to go back in your imagination to that place, to that year, to that situation, to those people with whom you were having a relationship in its highest form in your life. Maybe you don't have any such relationship at all. Then, you can think about or see in your imagination your mother loving you, keeping you in her lap as a child as a preschooler, holding your hands and taking you to the school or to the church or to a celebration or to shopping, or as a teenager guiding you, mentoring you, listening to you and praying with you. It’s very important to forget the present, forget your body, and forget your surroundings, forget people who are sitting next to you, forget your home and work. Listen to the far sound, listen to the near sound and enter into the inner most part of your life and remain quiet and calm. You are going to spend the next twenty minutes alone with the persons whom you want to get reconciled. You can see in your imagination Jesus as a shepherd. Leaving the 99 and searching for the lost sheep. He is talking about a shepherd who recognized the missing sheep while counting the sheep at the end of the day and putting them to pen. Even though it is already late at night or evening with wild animals, he is on a mission to get that lost sheep. You too run down in search of finding the relationship that is lost. You need to seek and search. You need to ask and share the relationship back. Ask the Lord the humility and willingness to come back in to that intimacy and trust, because only in relationship you can meet God. God is love and God is relationship. Lord Jesus teaches us that, humility to seek the lost relationship is within you. Lord, teach me to increase the trust and faith in the goodness of others, the gift of understanding, and compassion to forgive unconditionally, and to accept even if I may not agree with their defect or their mistake. Give me the humility and courage to accept the reality. Now you can see the gift of the Holy Spirit wrapping you around in seven colors like a rainbow from the top of your head to the sole of your feet. You are wrapped around with gift of the Holy Spirit. Just enjoy that moment. Just be wrapped around in that color. In that moment of silence with each breath let it wash away the lack of trust and the lack of forgiveness. He is carrying you on his shoulder because you are the lost sheep. Experience the warmth of his closeness, experience the unconditional love of his acceptance and the depth of his love that you are carried to the place where you want to be reconciled. Let it to be your home with your parents or with your partner or children or co-workers, teacher community, members wherever it is, the good shepherd is carrying you. Your strength is really going to be in your weakness because his love, his compassion is overtaking your weakness. The more you trust, you are in communion with him and you are forgiven. Start your dialogue with them in the presence of the Lord. The Lord is encouraging you to be honest and share your disagreement and talk about how you felt rejected, how you expected more love, how you expected more money or understanding, or how you wanted a better behavior, how you expected an apology. Enumerate each and everything; the more you narrate, better the healing. “Dad, mom you hurt me, you did not give me what I expected, my sweetheart my beloved you did not understand me. I expected you to help me to congratulate me or to encourage me or to give me opportunity.” There may be different untold needs that you want to express. Please be humble and courageous with the gift of the Holy Spirit, with the help of Jesus being with you. “Lord Jesus, I wanted to talk but I have a fear to talk to my dad, Lord I want to talk to my mom but I am inhibited because she is a perfectionist; Lord I want to talk to my partner who is critical but I am scared that I may go far away or rejected” Tell all your unexpressed emotions, all your innermost needs, all your regrets, not as accusation but with feeling to be reconciled. “Lord, help me to express so that I don’t further hurt myself or others and make me honest and expressive” Now as you express your needs and feelings about each and every event and situation, you look at their faces. They are getting upset too; they are also wondering but they are answering you. Listen to them. We all belong to the human family of limitations and weaknesses. Am I willing to let go and to accept even if I don’t agree with their behavior? Can I accept it? Jesus is telling you I love you unconditionally I am your father and mother you are not responsible for their behavior you are not responsible for the situation so he is releasing you from being a victim to the situation or to that relationship. Hurt- let go, get released, let you be unbound from that area of wound, hurt, neglect, misunderstanding or abuse, because the lord is healing you, he is really unbinding you, unlocking you, releasing you. The more you express, the more you talk about it; the more healing you experience, the more intimacy and trust is created in you, accepting yourself with limitations, and accepting others with limitations. He has a unique plan for you. Now you see an imagery of a new life. The healed person in you with head up, with self-confidence, with self-respect, with capacity to love, walking around in the group, taking leadership, doing service, asking apologies, asserting needs, requesting people to perform work, partnering with others, involving in teamwork, seeking, searching, sharing, you can see you have improved. Every morning, do this meditation and prepare for the day to meet with difficult people with past memories with prejudices and critical approach, then your prayer is going to equip you to develop a new pattern, a new character, a new ability in your personality. May God bless you with the gift of the Holy Spirit, fortitude and compassion with self-control and self-esteem. May God give you the blessing to heal yourself and your relationships.“Jesus thank you for this insight, thank you for this opportunity to communicate with people who hurt me. Thank you for this opportunity to trust with limitations and weaknesses. Thank you for allowing me to love myself, love others, love you and experience your love. Lord, allow me to fill with the love and life of the universe. Jesus, takeaway fear and inhibition from me and allow me to trust in love and goodness around me and in others and within me. From today I live a new life of trust. I live a new life of giving. I live a new life of not being a victim but a child of God. I am free, I am free…Thank you and praise you Lord for I can love, I can trust, I can forgive, I can accept even if I don’t agree with the mistakes and weaknesses of others. I thank you Lord for the wisdom, the humility, the courage and the new relationship. To start any new relationships, one has to have humility. We are going to have another imagery of a person who is coming to your door. First, you open your window and see a person approaching. Your room is all dark and that person can’t see any light. The stranger asks you to light a candle. You are in doubt and refuse. You are inhibited. You have fear. Again, the person is calling you by your name. Now you start feeling a little trust, little interest so you are searching for the candle and also the lighter. “I am waiting here in the darkness, but I really came to see you” call out the stranger. Then you became more and more anxious because you experience a throb of your heart knowing that the other is waiting. And the other has come to see you, to be with you that makes you feel important, loved and wanted and sought after. Finally, you light the lamp. You looked through the window. Then you see Jesus coming. You open the door wide and ran out with the lamp to meet with him and embrace him as he embraces you. This is what relationship is. Every person that knocks, every person that seeks and comes to you, you see the face of your creator and your redeemer. The relationship becomes easier and the trust deeper whether it is your partner or your children, whether with weakness or with defect in character, personality or mental health or emotional imbalance. Instead of focusing or sitting in the darkness, let us ask the Lord to give us the faith, to experience the love we share with one another. We are going to do this exercise each time when we meet that person, whether it is new or old relationship, with people who we live daily or work daily, so that we don’t lose respect and love, in meeting one another’s need, in sharing genuinely and in communicating openly so that the relationship could grow. Relationship needs love and sharing. Let us ask the Lord for the grace through the meditation to empower ourselves to be aware and conscious about growing in relationship which is growing towards God and becoming a blessing for one another and revealing the love of God and the light of God to the world. Thank you Jesus, thank you and praise you Jesus, help us to recognize the purpose of our existence as love and relationship which we have received from you, help us to be an apostle of love and relationship. Thank you and praise you Lord.