learn to forgive... and the challenge of teaching your children

Today I was attending a lecture which was about forgiving people.
If you loose something or something os taken from you, it will be recorded for you as if you had given this as sadaqa. And if somebody does bad to you, you should forgive him to seek Allahs appreciation.
Even if a person hates us or is bad to us we should not lower ourself to the same level of bad feelings but do our best to love and forgive that person, praying that he/she will be forgiven.
We don't do this because we are week or because we fear confrontation. We do this because we seek Allahs appreciation abd compensation.

Anyways, the thing that really impressed me and made me think was when my teacher told us the following story:
Sometimes her son would borrow two € from his sister and then refuse to give it back to her.
Her daughter would then come to complain about his wrong doing.
So how would the mother react?
She said to her daughter, you have to possibilities, or you ask him to give it back and you have all the right to do so, or you forgive him.
If the daughter would want to get the money from her brother back, the mother would criticise the son for his behaviour and give two € to the daughter.
If the daughter would chose to forgive her brother, the mother would go and give her daughter 5 €!!!
She would do this to teach her children that you have the right to get what belongs to you but also to teach them that it is better to forgive someone who did something bad to you and seek Allahs recompensation instead of hating that person or wanting bad for him.

This story made me once again realize what a responsibility we have as mothers to teach our children to be good muslims, to understand our religion and our values and to act accordingly. The mother and the education she gives is the basis of the child, so how careful we must be and how hard we must strive to fulfill our responsibility!!!

May Allah let us be a good parent and make it easy for us to raise our children according to his will. Ameen.