One of my favorite quotes is “When I Learn to Accept, Rather than Expect, I Will Have Fewer Disappointments.” I ran across this quote is a book titled “The Knight In Rusty Armor” by Robert Fisher many years back and it is one that I have processed and referenced many times. Acceptance has always been a big word for me as I have grown through hurts in my life. Learning to accept others for who they are was challenging for me to grasp. Learning to accept situations for how they play out was difficult. Learning to accept myself for who I am, was equally, if not more challenging than the first two. So as I have looked at acceptance and how it plays out in my life it has been refreshing to know that I have come a long way over the past 12 years in the department of acceptance.

I want to look at another side of acceptance that really had escaped my radar over the years. Last night I was watching a documentary on the success of Pixar Animation Studios and there was a line from one of the Pixar movies that triggered the thought of acceptance. I’m blanking on what movie triggered this thinking, but the thought was that we have to let go of something in order to accept something else. Something is going to replace what we let go of! All of a sudden I was seeing a different side of acceptance in the matter of one little line from an animated movie.

So I started to process this thought today and thought of many things that we accept when we let go of something else. I realized that this process works in two ways. We are either letting go of something positive and accepting something negative, or we are letting go of something negative and accepting something positive. I believe that when we are embracing the negative we are truly embracing the victim role and when we are embracing the positive we are embracing the accountable role. Here is a short list of items that I came up with in my processing:

Letting go of positive and accepting something negative (embracing the victim role):

  • Letting go of trust of a parent = Accepting mistrust in relationships
  • Letting go of love = Accepting fear
  • Letting go of faith = Accepting doubt and uncertainty
  • Letting go of connection = Accepting isolation
  • Letting go of passion = Accepting boredom
  • Letting go of dreams = Accepting mediocrity
  • Letting go of God’s will for us = Accepting a destructive lifestyle

[space height=”10″]Letting go of negative and accepting something positive (embracing the accountability role):

  • Letting go of bitterness = Accepting forgiveness
  • Letting go of one job = Accepting another job
  • Letting go of materialism = Accepting that I’m okay
  • Letting go of our past = Accepting of our future
  • Letting go of a relationship gone bad = Accepting new relationships
  • Letting go of fear = Accepting of love
  • Letting go of emotional bondage = Accepting of freedom
  • Letting go of judgments = Accepting acceptance of self and others

[space height=”10″]What could you add to this list? Which list have you spent most your time on…letting go of positives and accepting negatives or letting go of negatives and accepting positives? Have you spent more time in the victim role or the accountable role? You have a choice so I want to encourage you to make the choice today to embrace accountability! I believe that freedom can be found in embracing the right things. We were creating for freedom and I choose freedom today!