{"id":8278,"date":"2011-02-15T22:18:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T22:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=8278"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:36:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:36:25","slug":"day-95-grudge-stuff-throw-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=8278","title":{"rendered":"Day 95 – Grudge Stuff (Throw … Twice!)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I don’t know what else to label these items collectively than “Grudge Stuff”: a couple of letters, a print out of a blog entry, and some other documents – all dealing with my rocky relationship with a supervising\u00a0pastor who greatly offended my wife and me. I’ve mentioned several times here how bad my memory is.\u00a0 When it comes to “Forgive and forget”, forgetting is the easy part for me.\u00a0 Which is why I held on to this grudge stuff.\u00a0 I didn’t want to forget because I didn’t want to forgive. So I found these items in a box I was sorting through and I reread them all …\u00a0and\u00a0plenty of\u00a0anger and hurt returned afresh.\u00a0 (I didn’t even mention them to Melissa – I didn’t want to see her stew!) This is stuff from\u00a0six years ago and this individual played a large roll in catapulting me out of church ministry and into teaching. And even though I know it doesn’t necessarily mean that I have completely forgiven this man, I do feel like I took an important step towards total forgiveness when I threw this grudge stuff away. Here’s how crooked my heart is:\u00a0 I had the throw the darned things away TWICE. Before I threw away the physical papers, I sat down and recorded some of the key words and phrases that got me so riled up.\u00a0 Plenty of them! \u00a0I recorded them here in my rough draft for this blog.\u00a0 And only then did I throw away the papers. I suppose the dark part of my heart wanted to drag\u00a0this pastor\u00a0through the dirt a bit … publicly.\u00a0(Even though I would never name him here.)\u00a0 \u00a0And the needy part of my heart wanted to highlight the offenses in detail\u00a0in order to elicit some sympathy from anybody who might happen to read this blog.\u00a0 (Maybe I could insert a link to some sad violin music here<\/a> while I’m at it!) But ultimately I Threw the grudge stuff away a second time by hitting the Delete button here.\u00a0 So it’s really gone now and, even though I have a ways to go yet (obviously), I feel cleaner and more spiritually healthy than I felt while I was trying to preserve some part of the grudge stuff.\u00a0 When we consider all that the True and Holy God of\u00a0Heaven\u00a0has forgiven us, do we have a right to hold onto some minor grievance with a brother or sister here on earth?\u00a0 The parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18:21-35<\/a> can be a rather scary story if we take it seriously!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t know what else to label these items collectively than “Grudge Stuff”: a couple of letters, a print out of a blog entry, and some other documents – all dealing with my rocky relationship with a supervising\u00a0pastor who greatly offended my wife and me. I’ve mentioned several times here how bad my memory is.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8279,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8278\/revisions\/8279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}