The Grudge

Confession: there are people in my life who I struggle to let go of holding grudges against.

In irony, I think I struggle more with holding grudges towards individuals who have wronged me on less of a severe scale. I think because of the intensity of certain experiences, they automatically force us to need to bring it to the Lord. In our own pride, we struggle to relinquish the same control over some of those more regular occurrences of sin committed against us.

In Joseph’s story we think a lot about his journey with forgiving his brothers. We also think a lot about his journey with forgiving Potiphar. One of the individuals that I think we dwell on less often is his need to forgive the cupbearer.

Now it isn’t always helpful or wise when reading scripture to project our own thoughts and emotions onto the individuals in it, but I do think it can help at times to consider that our life situations are not modern problems. Yes, Joseph had individuals who committed great, intentional, horrific sins against him. He also had an individual who just forgot him.

Sometimes the people whose sins against us feel really difficult to forgive are the ones that push us to the cross the fastest. Sometimes we think to ourselves that they just didn’t need to do that. Sometimes we feel angry because the good we have done was not met with an equally positive response.

We don’t have wiggle room to hold onto bitterness when it’s just over a little thing. There isn’t an excusable level of sin - great or small, that allows us to hold onto our anger.

A lot of my focus on forgiveness is often directed towards deeper sins that have been committed against me. It has been the past few months that have really forced to the forefront of my focus the realization that I equally need to repent of the grudges I hold toward others who have also done me wrong, just “not as much”.