Balanced Charity

It can seem rather daunting to just start doling out understanding and I’ve spent countless hours on my knees and on my psychologist’s couch trying to tackle the more delicate aspects of it.  Where I once believed that charity and love meant always giving, giving, giving with no thought of self and trusting the nebulous idea that the Savior will make up whatever we lack, I have come to realize that there must be balance in our offerings.  I fought this principle for a long long long time because I thought I understood charity and I thought I just needed to have more faith.  But charity is a principled love, and her principles are meant to be applied in all of our relationships (self, God, others) simultaneously.  There are very few things that I can ever strike a regular balance with and I think charity has a fluid and forgiving nature.   But if we slide too far out of balance, we can start to feel some very valid resentment and frustration.   And if left un-checked, it’s natural for those feelings to lead to anger, blame and disillusionment.  Like anything else, the process of understanding what charity really entails takes patience-mostly with ourselves.  It also takes guts because some of the things you realize may fly in the face of what you’ve always thought.  It usually takes running straight into my limits and spending some time nursing my wounds down on the ground for me to realize that limits (also known as: my current level of mastery) can and should be respected.  There is a lot of beauty to be viewed when we’re honest about the current dimensions of our development because when we acknowledge the place where our abilities end and we have to determine when it’s needful to venture out beyond that it becomes obvious where His efforts begin.

#LovingOurselves #therapy #RelationshipSavior #Relationshipsself #Relationshipothers