| Alan B. Mac Farlane 2005-08-20, 8:46 am |
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H E L P I N G
My role as helper is not to do things for the person I am trying to
help, but to be things; not to try to control and change that persons
actions, but through understanding and awareness, to change my reactions.
I will change my negatives to positives, fear to faith; contempt for what
that person does to respect for the potential within that person;
hostility to understanding; and manipulation or over-protectiveness to
release with love; not trying to make that person fit a standard or image,
but giving that person an opportunity to pursue their own destiny,
regardless of what their choices may be.
I will change my dominance to encouragement; panic to serenity; the
inertia of dispair to the energy of my own personal growth; and
self-justification to self-understanding.
Self-pity blocks effective action. The more I indulge in it, the more
I feel that the answer to my problems is a change in others and in
society, not in my self. Thus I become a hopeless case.
Exhaustion is the result when I use my energy in mulling over the past
with regret, or in trying to figure ways to escape a future that has yet
to arrive. Projecting an image of the future and anxiously hovering over
it, for fear that it will or it won't come true uses all of my energy and
leaves me unable to live today. Yet living today is the only way to have
a life.
I will have no thought for the future actions of others, neither
expecting them to be better or worse as time goes on, for in such
expectations I am really trying to create them in my image. I will love
and let be.
All people are constantly changing. If I try to judge them, I do so
only on what I think I know of them, failing to realize that there is much
I do not know. I will give others credit for attempts at progress and for
having had many victories which are unknown.
I, too, am always changing, and I can make that change a constructive
one, if I am willing. I can change myself. Others, I can only love.
Annomyous
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