Ash & Evergreens

     I once saw a post by Jon Acuff that said "“Your 20s are lonelier than you expect. They’re glamorized in culture as the time of your life. The truth is, when you leave college, you leave the tightest, largest concentration of people your age. You must fight for community. Seek it out. Be brave. Be deliberate.  #GradAdvice ” -Jon Acuff     Something has never rang truer in my mind. Post college life is Topsy turvey, even if you go directly into your field of study. Where you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing aren't exactly clear cut. In fact, they are as clear as mud. Life after college is tough. You do leave that tight knit community and you leave that semi set in place schedule. You leave that last bit of full structure and you are whisked into the world. How you go about this time of life is what makes it or breaks it.     When I graduated college, I had a plan and it was a good one. I would try to...

   Have you ever felt the weight of someone's unforgiveness towards you? Have you ever felt the weight of your own unforgiveness towards someone else? Yesterday, our sermon was titled "Forgiveness Over Resentment" and it was so well done. I will include a link to it at the end of this post but I wanted to write on it a little bit. What is a time in your life where you needed to forgive someone and it took everything in you to do it? Or maybe the reverse happened. When was a time that you wronged someone and desperately needed their forgiveness? What did either of those times look like?   I believe there are 4 versions/options/levels/what have you of forgiveness.    Forgiveness by definition is: " to cease to feel resentment against (an offender)" (Websters) It is the ceasing of feeling resentment towards someone. Ceasing resentment, forgiveness, not making them pay for what they have done any more. Sometimes forgiveness happens quickly and sometimes, it ta...