All of us can help our society by holding ourselves to high standards. This does not mean holding someone accountable for what he or she said twenty-five years ago. This is unnatural and spiritually wrong. Who among us doesn’t have issues we have needed to forgive and asked to be forgiven from twenty-five years ago?

These types of issues cause an insanity that saps our energy because they bring up the feeling (from a deep layer of the emotional body) that we do not deserve to be forgiven. It costs all of us the ability to believe that life moves forward rather than backward. And when we as a society are part of the process by publicly seeing people put down because of something they said more than twenty-five years ago, we are all zapped at our core because it feeds our own feeling that we are unforgivable and cannot move forward.

That we are such an unforgiving society prevents many would-be great leaders from stepping up. We pick people to run our world whom we want to have a flawless past, so they can help humanity with its issues. Does this make sense? Wouldn’t you want a global leader who has walked through shadows, pain, challenges of life, and other problems and has proved how to do it so that he or she will not be separate from the rest of humanity? Are we naive enough to believe that a person whom we create to be separate from us by having a flawless resume’ is going to have empathy and solutions to problems that he or she is separate from?

Resume’s do not make leaders—life does. True leaders move us forward, not backward. We have problems like obesity (the slow death of the self), profanity (the slow death of energy), murdering our own (the slow and immediate death of humanity), and addiction, which takes away our present and our presents, or spiritual gifts (slow suicide), yet we are often fixated on something someone said one-quarter of a century ago.

Please, dear God, let us have our knowing becoming our growing and finally our showing.