If you could imagine the future into being, what do you see our better future looking like?

Now is the time to engage our thoughts and imagination into our view of how we see the new world functioning. In our brighter, better future, how are we going to express love for ourselves as well as others around us? In what way will we conduct business and interpersonal relationships with a better sense of heart? Can we lead the world with more compassion, forgiveness, empathy, connection, acceptance and generosity?

As the changes of life unfold before us, everything can be viewed through the lens of love or fear. How we see it, is the texture it takes on in physical reality. When layers of protection and confusion are peeled back enough, most everything we want for our future lies in a universal desire and right to be loved and feel love.

It is an innate belief that we have the right to seek our happiness and raise our children in a safe and healthy environment. It is a divine right that children be safe. When we realize what has been stealing the innocence of children, something clicks inside us, we just won’t see the world the same way, and in that instant the world has changed. We will not tolerate anything less than a world that allows us to see our children protected and treated as the special gifts from God that they are. What it may take to bring it about is for us to revolt and refuse any more targeting of our children and stand up and be loud to the point that we are heard clearly. If not now, when? If not us, then who?

Love heals and God is love. We must consider forgiveness an essential part of moving forward. To drop all baggage right here and now and step forward. Drop our fear of living life without excuses and protections.

“As regards my own sins it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men’s sins against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine percent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one percent of guilt which is left over. To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life—to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son—how can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.”

―C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

We are offered forgiveness. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what He says. To forgive others, we have to be ready to treat others as we would want God to treat us, refusing to go into old justifications and being willing to step forward in a new way. To forgive ourselves, we simply don the lens of love and see ourselves through God’s eyes. To consider our bodies as sacred vessels miraculously carrying a spark of God, not something that falls short of a picture in a magazine, that has probably been doctored in some way, but beautiful and special and a unique work of art. Worshiping and idolizing stars on a screen, has been a very poor replacement to living in the flow of nature and following the stars in the sky.

When we awake and come aware in the now moment, if we apply the lens of love to our world and our own lives, then we can draw from our experiences of suffering and adversity to apply patience and tolerance in our interactions with eachother. Love, patience and tolerance are a must for reducing negative emotions like hatred or anger. When things are going well, there just isn’t as much need to be patient and forgiving. But, when we come across tricky problems, when we suffer, we can work to develop and adjust these important tools of the heart. We aren’t always encouraged to bring these to a fight. Societal programming may even term them as weakness, but, when we are stepping into our vision of a bright new future, perhaps it is time to consider the true power of seeing eachother through the lens of love for one another as part of the human family, ready and willing to create this future together.