THE ART OF FORGIVENESS
for any situation, I start to experience happiness, and a smile comes to my face.
If we live in unforgiveness, we will focus our perspective on the faults in others and the areas of their lives that negatively affect us. We find it much more difficult to change our perspective and experience happiness around them. Noticing a beautiful sunset becomes difficult. Seeing the beauty of life becomes elusive.
The cool thing is, when you live a lifestyle of forgiveness, you are more likely to sense those moments that cause you to be happy and stop to “smell the roses” and the awe of creation. Happiness can come at a memory sparked by a smell, a sound, a touch, or by a present experience that causes you to stop and take notice of a blessing.
In relationship, you can use these times to strengthen your connection of friendship with others and share in those moments.
Joy
What is joy?
Some define “joy” as “a feeling of great happiness,” “a source or cause of great happiness: something or someone that gives joy to someone,” or “success in doing, finding, or getting something.”
These definitions relate joy to a tangible object, or to an event. The trouble with these definitions is that if we look at it through our finite human minds, joy could be an elusive object that seems to evade our experiences. We would find it difficult to grab hold of, or it could slip through our fingers when we experience failure, loss, or any negative feeling.
To truly understand joy, it would help to go back to the Greek language to find the essence of the word. The Greek word for joy is chara , pronounced “khar-ah,” with the emphasis on the second syllable. If you look at the defini- tion at face value, it seems it would be the same as Webster’s definition—”joy, gladness, source of joy.”
However, let’s break the word apart into its root meanings. The root of the word is xar- , which means “extend favor, lean towards, be favorably disposed.” As is usually the case, a word can hold so much more meaning when we look at the root of the word and the essence of its meaning.
Xara (chara) , then, means “the awareness of (God’s) grace, favor, joy” or “grace recognized.” There are a couple of other words in Greek that are connected to the same root: xairo , meaning “rejoice because of (God’s) grace,” and xaris , meaning “grace.”