The Magnetized Man

Maybe someone will accuse you of something you didn’t do based on all the little bad things you did do. 

Maybe you kind of know you did something wrong, but you’re also unsure about the rules of the game and what actually constitutes culpability. 

Maybe you want to act differently but you’re worried that people from your past will remind you of how you used to be, used to act, used to think, used to operate. (This is an example of consequences, by the way. Forgiving yourself or changing doesn’t mean we won’t suffer consequences, although we can always ask God to lessen the severity of those consequences or make our disposition more easily manage it.)

Sometimes, wanting to be the perfect protagonist is hard and that’s because the definition of a perfect protagonist is always changing. Sometimes, it’s a drug dealer who loves his family. I bet there was a time the perfect protagonist was someone who was hard on their family but always provided and didn’t EVER do drugs. Sometimes, the perfect protagonist is a guy who commits a bunch of crime and kills people…but he’s a perfect gentleman towards every woman. I bet there was a time when the protagonist was someone who followed the letter of the law…but had very little time for women that weren’t his family. 

By the way, I haven’t included women in this not because women don’t struggle with this, but because women know this from near childhood. In my mind, I say that men are traditional computers and women are quantum computers. Men are good at being one thing — so long as it’s rewarded. Women are good at being multiple things and seeing the sacrifices involved in each decision. They are constantly collapsing their wave to be what’s needed in the reality they chose. And they follow those rules or those instructions so perfectly — assuming some kind of moral or ethical basis to those rules or instructions — that when they see an unashamed change in the game, they’re furious, because they could have “cheated” better if they hadn’t been pinned down by what they thought everyone had agreed was right versus wrong.

When I was a kid, I thought you shouldn’t sell something unless you knew for certain that it would work. I went into the workforce trying to make sure a promise went unfulfilled. Then I realized the definition of sanity in the workplace is doing just enough to cover your butt. Then I tried adopting that mentality. Then I burnt out. As an adult, I’m told to make people pay. To blame. To sue. But I can’t help but think no one else knows what they’re doing either. And that if I were to adopt the logic of blame, people will come collect on any blame I’ve unknowingly accumulated as well.  

So I’m circling back, as always, to compassion, forgiveness, and mercy — for yourself first and then others. When you know what it takes to forgive yourself — commitment to not making the same mistakes or understanding that the situation can’t be helped — you understand how to be giving without expecting anything in return. And when you have that thought — I deserve to be punished, I deserve nothing — you can accept that maybe you do deserve that from a justice perspective — maybe the debilitating thought itself IS the justice! — but then you can have mercy on yourself. And when it’s difficult to give yourself mercy, you can get it from God, who is the Most Compassionate and the Most Merciful.