A grievance can be like a splinter in the sole of your foot. You don’t want to stop to deal with it. You hope it will work its way out by itself. But it doesn’t work its way out: it wriggles in deeper. It causes more pain, and you think maybe you’ll get used to it. But not only does the pain intensify, it begins to spread, so that the whole area around the splinter becomes hypersensitive. You must take action to get rid of it, and even for just a splinter you might need help with the extraction.
But not all grievances are like splinters. If you had a bullet in your chest, you wouldn’t hope it would extract itself. You’d know you’d need a surgeon urgently. The more serious an offense is, the more urgent it is for you to let go of your grievance. Refusing to let go of it because it’s the other person’s fault is like refusing to let the surgeon extract a bullet because someone else shot you. Yes, it’s the other person’s fault. But you are the one who has been injured. Therefore you are the one who must undergo treatment. It will be a painful and difficult experience, but in the long run you’ll be much better off than the person crippled by a lifetime’s worth of retained grievances.
How do we distinguish a grudge from everything else roiling inside?
A grudge is not horror at evil. If someone who was supposed to be good harms you, what you may feel, more intensely than rancor at the offense is horror at the evil of which you are now aware. Horror is not something you can let go of, not anymore than you can let go of the shadow cast by darkening clouds overhead. Only God can clear the skies for you.
A grudge is not grief at love spurned. If someone you’ve loved cuts you off, what you must let go of is the grievance at the injustice of it. The sorrow will endure.
A grudge is not fear of future harm. If someone hurts you who has the power to do so again, you can’t let go of the past while still eaten up with anxiety at what might happen next. Pray for deliverance from your enemy: the Psalms are full of such prayers.
A grudge is not the memory of what occurred. If you have the sort of imaginative memory that serves up again and again not only the details but all the original feelings, so that you relive the experience over and over, you may dearly wish you could let it go, but you can’t escape your own mind. Consider this: Jesus when he visited his disciples after his resurrection still had holes in his hands and a gash in his side—but the wounds didn’t bother him. So too will yours be, if you commit them to God. Forgiving doesn’t have to mean forgetting.
Unlike these living emotions of horror, grief, fear and pain, a grudge is a cold, hard, dead thing within you, impervious to change. It wants revenge and will always want revenge, long after you’ve ceased to feel anything else.
When the thirst for vengeance sets in, it’s like a bacterial infection that develops in a contaminated wound. If it isn’t addressed at once, it can become chronic, like vengeful feelings that persist for years after an offense. The infection can invade your whole body and ruin your health. Vengeful thoughts can obsess you even after the perpetrator is dead. You become vindictive and spiteful. You can’t punish the person who harmed you, so you lash out at someone else nearby. You exact retribution for every petty offense, because everything irritates your sensitive area, and eventually every area is sensitized, because you go through life collecting grievances. Rancor is the only emotion you know anymore, but the word is unfamiliar, because the spiritual state is so normalized that no one names it.
Jesus tells us to pray, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” The phrase rolls off the tongue easily, but living it may involve a long, hard ordeal. It’s what you’ve got to do, though, if you want to live.
How? You have to accept what God said a long time ago: “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’” This isn’t forgiveness yet: but it’s a necessary step on the way to forgiveness.
