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Forgiveness…what does it cost?

February 23, 2010

The story is told of the creative Sunday School Teacher who requested each student bring a clear plastic bag and a sack of potatoes to class.

The next Sunday with bags in hand the teacher asked us to take a potato out of the bag for every person we have refused to forgive. Some marked mom, dad, brother, friend etc. on the potatoes and inserted them in the clear plastic bag. Some of the bags, as you can imagine, were quite heavy.

Then the teacher asked each of us to carry this bag around with us for the next week —EVERYWHERE we went. We were encouraged to place the bag by our bed at night and put it in a car seat to travel with us. Even asked to store it under our desk at work — take it everywhere was the command!

I don’t know about you but two pounds of potatoes get heavy after awhile. In the morning it is light as a feather and easy to move around. By lunch it is in the way. By dinner time it is a nuisance. And by bed time it is intolerable. Just two pounds of potatoes!

Day after day lugging those potatoes around — soon we were getting stronger from the effort. We were in weight training!

But then the inevitable happened. All that banging around bruised the potatoes and soon they began to seep juice and then they began to smell. We could handle the weight but soon the smell became repulsive and no one wanted to be around us.

What a great way to teach a lesson of forgiveness. We learned that not forgiving someone is a weight we think we can carry but the smell of unforgiveness is repulsive.

I got this in an email from Cyber*Daily*Devotion
From Pastor Bill
An Outreach of Christian*Cyber*Ministries

The bag was a continual reminder of how much attention we have to pay to the weight of unforgiveness at all times — especially when we’d leave it in embarrassing places.

Too often I think of forgiveness as a gift to others, yet the potato example clearly shows the gift is to each of us as well! So, the next time I decide I can’t forgive someone, I need to ask myself — “Is this unforgiveness I’m holding on to worth the extra weight and stink created?”