Final judgement

 Something that has been on my mind lately is the final judgement. I don’t believe in fire and brimstones. Instead, I believe we sit in a space of love so beautiful that we are able to see all of our shortcomings and it is we who judge ourselves, not anyone else. I have come to this conclusion after seeing an image once of Jesus and me after one of my deaths. In that image I saw that there was no judgement from him, but the love I was surrounded with was so intense that I was able to see exactly how I had behaved. It then became an issue of me being able to forgive myself.

I have watched a number of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) on U tube and most of these describe meeting up with a beautiful loving presence after their temporary death. Many describe a life review where they see their behaviour and feel the impact that behaviour had on others. If they caused another pain, then they feel that pain and conversely, a good deed is felt too. Also, many are shown the ramifications of their actions. For example, being nasty to one person, who goes on to hurt another, who goes home and yells at their kids, who in turn pull the cat’s tail and so on. Anything we do has a ripple effect.

I have been trying to think how my final judgement will be. How have I hurt others in this life? What kind of ramifications have my actions had? I don’t know why I have been thinking this way of late. I certainly know how others have hurt me. Being a sensitive person with low self-esteem, I most likely attracted way more than my fair share of hurts. As part of my healing process, I have healed as many of these as I have identified and forgiven the people involved. But it is harder to identify one’s own actions and how they may have hurt others. For example, in an argument, I know I have been guilty of saying things I don’t mean. Apologising is always hard, as is saying that those things I said, I didn’t really mean. Has the damage already been done and engraved a hurt deep inside another’s being?

Have the little things we have hardly noticed we have done, had deep reaching effects on others?

I remember in the shearing gang once, someone broke my broom, one I had specially made for the job. In those days, the only brooms one could buy were straw ones. I had assembled my own using Perspex with a wooden handle. This was easier to shift the wool with than the straw brooms. Now days everyone has a broom like mine, as a company started making similar ones, but using plastic instead.

At the time, I was working in a gang with three fast shearers, who all went on to become World Shearing record holders. We worked hard. The first shearer jumped up to start after the break and I did to, and ran to grab my broom. Someone had used it during the break, broken it, and failed to tell me what they’d done. But that wasn’t the worst of it. My fellow shedhand started laughing. I felt really hurt, not so much that the broom was broken, but that this girl had delighted in seeing me without my broom. I felt humiliated that I wasn’t valued enough to be told. It felt like a deliberate act of nastiness. She had just been waiting for me to discover it. If someone had told me, sorry, I broke your broom, I would have been fine. I also would have had time to hunt for another straw broom, which the farmers supplied. Once a woolshed gets full of wool bales, unused things tend to get hidden. And replacing my broom would have to wait for a wet day, when we were rained off, and I could go to town for the pieces to make another one.

That particular girl often did unkind things to me and when we met up some years later and discussed some of these things (she was now my long-lost buddy), she admitted that jealousy was what had driven her actions at the time.

I carried that hurt for years, until I learnt to do the work on myself. She passed not long after our meeting and I wonder if that action came up in her life review and if she felt the pain she had caused me.

But that is an aside. My question is how have I hurt others? I don’t recall deliberately being nasty to anyone but as I said, I know in times of anger or when I have been hurt I have said unkind things. I just hope that others have been able to forgive me and when my time comes that I can forgive myself if new images come up, that I haven’t worked on.

Having just written this, I do recall a time I was nasty to a girl in our class. I must have been about nine. This girl had boils all over her body, she stole and was constantly bullied. Everyone called her Whammy. I had never joined in, but I did one day and was promptly called out by the teacher for it. I have often found when doing my healing work on others and myself that often it is the unexpected that we hang on to. That girl may have gotten used to having certain people calling her Whammy, but when it came from someone who never did, that might have been the one that hurt, the one that she hung onto. I see I have some more forgiving of myself needed because I am also seeing a time when I blamed another person for my actions. I hope in both of these cases, these people have been able to forgive me.