Reminders: How Heavy is It?
by Ardith Hoff
An elementary school teacher tried a little experiment with her students. She asked them to bring one tomato to school for each person who had been mean to them. They were to put the tomatoes in a plastic bag and carry them everywhere for a week.
Some children had several tomatoes in their bags and complained that their bags were getting too heavy to carry around, but the teacher insisted that they carry them anyway. Later in the week, some of the children started to complain that their tomatoes were starting to stink. The teacher did not let up until the end of the week when the experiment was over.
She asked the children why they thought she had asked them to continue to carry their tomatoes. The children were so disgusted with the whole thing that they didn’t even want to think about tomatoes anymore. The teacher persisted! “Have you ever been hurt so badly by someone that your whole body ached? Has the pain of it all weighed you down so much that you couldn’t seem to think about anything else? This happens to a lot of people. It seems like there is just no way to get past the pain that person caused.”
Then the teacher asked her students to think about the children that each of the tomatoes in their bag originally represented. “How do you think your bag could have been lightened, so that you wouldn’t have had that tomato in the bag in the first place?” Some of the children were still puzzled, but several of them caught on to the point of the experiment. “If I had forgiven that person, I wouldn’t have had to carry his stinking tomato,” one little boy proclaimed. “That’s it!” said the teacher. “If we forgive those who hurt us, we don’t have to carry the hurt with us. The bags we carry get lighter, and we feel better.”
We all carry grudges from time to time. Forgiving people who caused the problem can lighten our load more quickly. As it says in Colossians 3:13 “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord has forgiven you.”