Cancel Your Debts
Heal From The Hurt of Others
Immaculée Ilibagiza lost nearly her entire family in the Rwanadan Genocide in 1994. Violence tore her country apart, as 500,000 were murdered. Her 2006 book Left to Tell1 chronicles her experiences.
She spent 91 days hiding in a tiny bathroom in the home of a pastor with seven other women, fearing for her life.
Outside those walls, neighbors and even former friends turned into her enemies—people who once shared meals with her family became the ones who hunted them down.
After the genocide had come to a close, Immaculée learned that her parents and siblings had been killed. The weight of anger and hatred overwhelmed her.
Yet, instead of being consumed by those emotions, she chose a different path.
Everything but her life had been taken from her. Yet, this was just the beginning of her journey.
Immaculée went to visit a prison that held the leader of the gang who had murdered her parents. After meeting him face-to-face, she recognize him as the father of some of her childhood friends. They both began to weep.
As their eyes met, she took his hands and said what she had come to say.
"I forgive you."
In that moment, she said, "my heart eased immediately, and I saw the tension release in Felicien's shoulders."
From this point onwards, Immaculée Ilibagiza gave herself to helping others heal from genocide and suffering by discovering the power of forgiveness that comes through cancelling the debts that others owe you.
She ends Left to Tell by proclaiming, "The love of a single heart can make a world of difference. I believe that we can heal Rwanda — and our world — by healing one heart at a time.”
In today’s YOU Not Me Letter, I will show you the beauty in your scars, teach you about The Lincoln Letter, and help you see how YOU Not Me can re-write your story.
The Beauty In Your Scars
What if I told you that beauty hides itself somewhere deep within your wounds and scars?
Before you object, consider that sentence again.
Many of you reading this have been victims of injustice, wrongdoing, maliciousness, and evil of all sorts.
Everyone wears the stripes of suffering.
The pain of your past marks you.
However, I want to show you the way to freedom and healing.
Indeed, everyone lives with a degree of brokenness. Life is hard. The world often feels like a cruel place.
Betrayal, exploitation, and splintered relationships remind you that most people live for themselves and repay what others did to them. They cast others aside to try to lift themselves up. They think that they will overcome their pain by hurting others in return.
But, that only continues the cycle.
Within your pain, however, hides an opportunity to grow in forgiveness, grace, and love. Beauty can blossom from the soil of suffering.
When you face your pain with the right mindset like Immaculée Ilibagiza, it even holds the power to heal the world around you.
It all depends on how you choose to respond to it.
You don’t have to lash out. You don’t have to hurt them back.
If you have ever received true forgiveness from someone else, you can Be The Change by showing others grace. Forgive them and love them well in return. It will heal your hurt, and in the end, it might just heal them too.
The Lincoln Letter
Not too long ago, I learned that when Abraham Lincoln experienced wrong or injustice, he would write a letter of response at night, leave it in his desk drawer, and sleep on it.
The next morning, if his feeling persisted, he sent it.
However, he rarely sent such a letter, and thus protected himself from hurting himself and others around him.
The Lincoln Letter teaches a valuable lesson.
Oftentimes, you will feel tempted to lash out at once when others hurt you. Your emotions can overcome you and prevail if you’re not careful and don’t have strategies to combat them in place. You just end up hurting other people in return in an attempt to “get even” or level the playing field.
But that doesn’t solve anything. It just makes things worse.
So, if you feel yourself coming to a boil, pause. Get out a piece of paper and write the person or the situation a letter.
It may be painful to relive your past experiences and think through them. But, in order to heal from them, you have to address them.
Reflect on them so that you can see them from a different perspective.
Release yourself and others from the prison cell of bitterness.
Cut yourself loose from the proverbial ball and chain of pain that you drag along.
If you do this, you can walk, and maybe even run, into the future with freedom.
During the Real Estate Fallout in 2007 and 2008, I worked with a builder who I trusted.
He had signed agreements to purchase properties from me and even used a good amount of my money, but then declared bankruptcy. He accounted for the majority of my financial losses. It ended up costing me everything.
After all of this took place, I was out running some errands one day and saw him.
I decided to walk over to say hello.
He mentioned that my approach shocked him, because I didn’t punch him in the face like one of his other investors had.
Even though his choices hurt and upset me, I realized that the Fallout, and even my situation, wasn’t 100% his fault - I played a part in it as well.
Yet, because I took a different approach to his poor decisions, our interaction didn’t continue the hurt or deepen the wound. In fact, it mended it.
His decisions had also affected his own life. He too lost everything and his marriage fell apart because of that. That interaction reminded me that I should never lash out at anyone, no matter how much they wronged me.
The truth is, people who hurt others are already suffering the consequences of their actions at some level, and they need help to begin to heal themselves and then repair the damage they have inflicted on others and their relationships.
Re-Write Your Story with YOU Not ME
Every summer I speak to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Youth Envision Academy.
Envision Academy is an eight week summer program that exposes high school students to valuable work experiences and introduces them to the Charlotte community, while also teaching them the skills and life lessons that they will need to grow into great leaders in Charlotte and beyond.
Teaching them about the YOU Not Me Mindset ranks as one of my favorite things that I get to do all year.
One of the years, we spent quite a long time discussing the dangers of bitterness and holding on to pain from your past.
As I finished explaining that the only way to get out of bitterness comes through choosing forgiveness, a girl stood up at once and asked a question.
She said, “What if someone did something so hurtful and so terrible that you could never forgive them?”
I answered her by first expressing how sad I felt that she had suffered whatever it was that she had gone through.
Then, I explained that if you hold onto that experience and feeling, it’s like putting yourself in a psychological prison.
The only way to release yourself from that prison is through utilizing the key of forgiveness.
After we had spoken for a while, she expressed that she still felt unable to forgive the person who wronged her.
Although I understood her feelings, I told her that if you decide to do that, you will only continue to hurt yourself and let this eat you alive from the inside-out.
After a couple days, I got an email from that same girl.
She said that she wanted to let me know that she appreciated me coming to speak and that she realized after the talk I gave that she needed to forgive this person.
Because of the pain and anger that hung heavy upon her when I proposed forgiveness as the way to healing, she felt like she would just have to let the other person off the hook for what they had done to her.
She felt angry that this person wouldn’t have to pay for it, or at least apologize to try and make it right.
This current society wants justice when someone has been disrespected or hurt. People want “an eye for an eye.” But as the old saying goes, then everyone ends up blind.
As she thought more about it and my message had time to sink in, she realized that she needed to try to forgive the person.
She said that once she started to take steps to forgive them, she was amazed that she already felt some relief.
Her email finished with, “I just wanted to thank you, because I have decided to use the ‘YOU Not Me’ Mindset to rewrite my story and to make more genuine connections. I realized living this way will get me way farther than thinking negatively and combatively. Thank you and be blessed.”
Sometimes you need to see that forgiveness isn’t just possible, but transformational.
You may even need to forgive yourself for something you have done, as I did. Next week, speaking from my own experiences, I will teach you how to do this.
You can find beauty in the scars and ashes. Your biggest setbacks can become your biggest springboard forward in life. Your past doesn’t define your future - it only tells the story of how you got to be who you are today.
You have a choice in how you will now move forward to create something beautiful and beyond what you could have ever hoped!
That choice is an essential part of healing. And you need healing from what others have done to you, if you haven’t already experienced it.
If you take anything away from this week, I want you to remember that the next time you face someone who hurt you or caused you pain, you have a choice in how you respond.
You don’t have to lash out. You don’t have to hurt them back. You can Be The Change by showing them grace, forgiving, and loving them well. It will heal you, and in the end, it might just heal them too.
Ilibagiza, Immaculée. and Steve Erwin. Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust. Carlsbad, Calif., Hay House, Inc, 2006.