Forgiveness...... Ohhhh it feels GREAT!!!

I read a blog this morning that stirred up some past emotion and or experience for me. I feel it is a story worth sharing, as it is something that I'm sure many teenage girls are dealing with.

When I was in high school, I typically hung out with the "cool crowd" I attended a failry small school of about 500 students.

Looking back I now know that it was jealousy fueling the issues, but at the time I really thought it WAS ALL ABOUT ME. I truly believed that there was SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME.

The group of girls which I was so-called friends with, turned on me, overnight.

I felt as if I came to school one day and suddenly had 8 or 9 absolute worst enemies. They spread like wild fire, telling everyone in the school how awful and how terrible of a person I was. Creating and fabricating story after story about me.

These hateful, awful words grew into actions. They began to harass me, they began to vandalize my car, they egged my car numerous times, they even went so far as to attempt to "ruin" a going away party I hosted at my home for someone else by filling super soakers with bleach water.

I did everything possible to do damage control, but it did no good. By this point there were so many of them telling the story no one dared believe me.

At this point I actually moved out of my home, away from my family and transferred schools, to a new high school about 20 miles away. Not even this stopped them. One winter morning I walked out to my car to go to school, as I sat down inside the car I realized that my entire car windshield had been bashed in with a hammer.

The police finally agreed to get involved at this point, but we still had no evidence that proved it to be any one of these girls.

No resolution ever came, but after they were one by one pulled out of class to speak to the police they finally stopped.

So....... now fast forward 10+ years later........ I sign up for the social networking sites........ haven't seen or talked to any of these people in the past 10 yrs. And suddenly I begin to receive messages from a few of the girls.

Let me tell you, by this point I have grown enough as a person that I fully and completely accept every single challenge, and appreciate the lessons I learned. I have forgiven these people for the things they did, and I also fully appreciate that I am a much stronger, more confident woman because of these challenges.

But as these girls find me, I start receiving appologies.......... TEN YEARS LATER!!! They felt the need to apologize, now that was excellent to hear that they had carried this, for a lack of better words, "regret or shame" and they actually had grown enough themselves to apologize.

This was a defining moment for me! I knew that I had let it go long before, and I also learned that letting it go makes so much space in your life for things that fulfill you, and things that make you a better person! But most importantly, I truly learned from this experience, that we must evaluate the challenges we face....... We must really analzye these situations and look to find the lesson to be learned!

I learned courage, I learned perserverance, I learned forgiveness, I learned trust in myself, and I learned strength to be ME!


If you know of any teenage girl who is struggling with a similar situation please take it seriously. The police wouldn't help, the parents of all of these girls looked the other way, and I felt had no other option but to move out of my family's home and change school districts from the one which I had attended K through 10th grade to get away. Take action now!!!

You could save a teenage girls life!

With Love,
Crystal