"Wholeness"

I found this exerpt from Kushner's book several years ago and copied it down. It has taken on new meaning for me in recent days. Perhaps it will help someone else this week too. 

"Wholeness"

from "How Good Do We Have to Be?"

by Harold S. Kushner

"There is a wholeness about the man or woman who has learned that he or she is strong enough to go through a tragedy and survive, the person who can lose someone through death, through divorce, through estrangement and still feel like a complete person and not just part of a broken couple. At that point, nothing can scare you. You have been through the worst and come through it whole.

There is a wholeness about the person who can give himself away, who can give his time, his money, his strength, to others and not feel diminished when he does so. There is a wholeness about the person who has come to terms with his limitations, who knows who he is and what he can and cannot do, the person who has been brave enough to let go of his unrealistic dreams and not feel like a failure for doing so.

When we have lost part of ourselves and can continue rolling through life and appreciating it, we will have achieved a wholeness that others can only aspire to.

That, I believe, was what God asked of Abraham. Not "Be perfect," not "Don't ever make a mistake," but "Be whole." To be whole before God means to stand before Him with all of our faults as well as all of our virtues, and to hear the message of our acceptability. To be whole means to rise above the fear that we will be rejected for not being perfect. And it means having the integrity not to let the inevitable moments of weakness and selfishness become permanent parts of our character.  Know what is good and what is evil, and when you do wrong, realize that that was not the essential you. It was because the challenge of being human is so great that no one gets it right every time.  God ask no more of us than that.