Stealing from The Minion

Hello everyone.  Today I want to tell you about something that happened to me this week.  On Tuesday, my wonderful girlfriend and I went to eat dinner at a local Mexican food restaurant here in Fort Worth.  While we were in the restaurant eating, someone broke the glass out of my vehicle and stole my iPhone.  That's pretty mean right?  Well in the process there was some additional body work that needed to be done and it's in the shop.

I bet some of you are already a little mad at the person who did this right?  I was for a short time.  This brings me to what I want to discuss today.  Today's blog is about forgiveness.

I know of a person who holds grudges extremely well.  This person is not into forgiveness.   As a matter of fact, this person can bring up injustices whether real or perceived from thirty years ago and relive them just like they were yesterday.  Now this person, who I will call person A has held a grudge against person B for at least 40 years and when A brings up events that caused the hurt over 4 decades ago, it's as if it happened last week.  You can see A's blood pressure go up and A's face turn red.  You can see the tension in A's body and all the stress.

B, on the other hand is just living life without one care about all that stuff.  I can tell you that B hardly ever brings any of it up.  I learned a lesson from watching this.  Who was really hurt all these years by the events of forty years ago?  The answer is A.  A has been damaged for not forgiving.  Now the bible says that God can't forgive us if we can't forgive other people so we must learn to forgive.  But aside from that extremely important fact, it's important for us to forgive others who have done us wrong because it frees us from the damaging effects of holding things against them.

I know this can be very hard.  I was in a relationship once with someone who did something that they shouldn't have done and this hurt me deeply because it betrayed a basic trust that I had with that person (I don't think the person I am talking about reads this blog, so if you are my friend and reading this it's probably not you).  I could have held a grudge and I could have worn that wrong suffered like a coat full of spikes on the inside lining but the only person who would have gotten hurt was me.  The other person never even asked my forgiveness.  But I decided to give the people involved forgiveness because I didnt' want the hurt.

Now this is exactly what I did after the incident with my phone.  After about thirty minutes, I cooled off and started thanking God that no one got hurt, I got to spend an great evening eating with someone I love, and at the end of the day everything was going to be OK.  After I got done with the thankfulness part, I purposely, from my heart, forgave whoever stole my phone.  Do you know what happened?  It set me free from the weight of unforgiveness.

So let me encourage you right now.  If you are holding on to something that someone has done to you, forgive them and let it go because unforgiveness only hurts you.

And that's another Opinion of the Minion.