Choose Love Forgiveness

On December 14, 2012, Scarlett Lewis experienced something that no parent should ever have to endure: she lost her son Jesse in an act of unimaginable violence. The day started just like any other, but when a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Scarlett’s life changed forever. However, this isn’t a story about a massacre. It’s a story about love and survival. It’s about how to face the impossible, how to find courage when you think you have none, and how to choose love instead of anger, fear, or hatred. Following Jesse’s death, Scarlett went on an unexpected journey, inspired by a simple three-word message he had scrawled on their kitchen chalkboard shortly before he died: Norurting Helin Love (Nurturing Healing Love). It was as if he knew just what his family would need in order to go on after this horrible tragedy. Bolstered by his words, Scarlett took her first step toward a new life. And with each step, it became clearer how true Jesse’s message was. She learned that love was indeed the essential element necessary to move forward and that taking the path of love is a choice. We can live in anger and resentment, or we can choose love and forgiveness. With her decision made, she found some peace and began to believe that choosing love was the key to creating a healthy, safe, and happy world. She began the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation to develop programs to teach children about the power each of us has to change our thoughts and choose a life without fear and hate. Nurturing Healing Love is Scarlett’s story of how choosing love is changing her life—and how it could change our world. A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will be donated to the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation. To learn more about the foundation or to make a donation, go to www.jesselewischooselove.org.

My name is Scarlett Lewis, and I'm the founder of the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement. This initiative started with three words written on a kitchen chalkboard by my six-year-old son, Jesse McCord Lewis, on the morning of December 14, 2012. He wrote, "nurturing, healing, love." He lost his life later that day alongside six educators and 19 of his classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. His message constitutes a powerful formula for choosing love.The Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to reaching students, educators, and individuals, both nationally and internationally, with a simple, yet profound formula for choosing love. Our signature program uses "nurturing, healing, love" as a foundation for learning and for life. Learn more about the foundation on its website: www.jesselewischooselove.org

What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Get Ready for Unstoppable Inner Peace Author Corinne Zupko undertook her study of psychology out of necessity when debilitating anxiety threatened to derail her life. Seeking ways to do more than temporarily alleviate her symptoms, Corinne began to study A Course in Miracles (ACIM), mindfulness meditation, and the latest therapeutic approaches for treating anxiety. In From Anxiety to Love, she shares what she learned and gently guides you through the process, helping you undo anxiety-based thinking and fostering mindful shifts in your thoughts and actions. Whether struggling with everyday stress or near-crippling discomfort, you will find that Corinne’s approach offers a new way of healing from — rather than just coping with — fear and anxiety.

Christians are supposed to forgive others as we've been forgiven. But hearing the call to forgive is different from knowing how to practice forgiveness at home and in the world. Forgiveness is about more than the isolated acts and words of individuals. To forgive and be forgiven, we need communal practices and disciplines for a way of life that makes for peace. Greg Jones and Célestin Musekura describe how churches and communities can cultivate the habits that make forgiveness possible on a daily basis. Following the Rwandan genocide, Musekura lost his father and other family members to revenge killings. But then he heard God tell him to forgive the killers. The healing power of forgiveness in his own life inspired him to work for forgiveness and reconciliation across Africa. Jones, author of Embodying Forgiveness, interacts with Musekura's story to show how people can practice forgiveness not only in dramatic situations like genocide but also in everyday circumstances of marriage, family and congregational life. Together they demonstrate that forgiving and being forgiven are mutually reciprocating practices that lead to transformation and healing.

Have you ever been hurt, betrayed, used or done wrong? At some point in life, we all experience wounds from others. But, staying hurt is not okay. When we refuse to let go of the hurt, it turns to unforgiveness and unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die. It eats our lunch. This book is all about HOW to forgive, how to dig into the Bible when you've been hurt and let the Word set you free. Forgiveness is how God does do-overs and it's how He makes things new and gives us a fresh start. You and I were made new because He forgave us. Forgiveness is the key to cut the chain to our past hurts and to walk away free. This book shows the power of forgiveness and includes miracle stories about people who thought that forgiveness wasn't the answer to their problems, but when they learned to forgive, their lives were transformed!

One can love and not forgive or out of love decide not to forgive. Or one can forgive but not love, or choose to forgive but not love the ones forgiven. Love and forgiveness follow parallel and largely independent paths, a truth we fail to acknowledge when we pressure others to both love and forgive. Individuals in conflict, sparring social and ethnic groups, warring religious communities, and insecure nations often do not need to pursue love and forgiveness to achieve peace of mind and heart. They need to remain attentive to the needs of others, an alertness that prompts either love or forgiveness to respond. By reorienting our perception of these enduring phenomena, the contributors to this volume inspire new applications for love and forgiveness in an increasingly globalized and no longer quite secular world. With contributions by the renowned French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the poet Haleh Liza Gafori, and scholars of religion (Leora Batnitzky, Nils F. Schott, Hent de Vries), psychoanalysis (Albert Mason, Orna Ophir), Islamic and political philosophy (Sari Nusseibeh), and the Bible and literature (Regina Schwartz), this anthology reconstructs the historical and conceptual lineage of love and forgiveness and their fraught relationship over time. By examining how we have used—and misused—these concepts, the authors advance a better understanding of their ability to unite different individuals and emerging groups around a shared engagement for freedom and equality, peace and solidarity.

Jefferson Bear's tickling stick has gone missing. Have you seen my tickling stick? he asks his friend Figgy Twosocks. No, JB she says - its the first time she's ever told a fib. Whilst finding the stick, wise JB teaches Figgy another secret to good friendship - how to forgive and forget.