Wednesday, February 9, 2011

holding a grudge

A few weeks ago Jeremy had some of the guys over to play poker. Ben always gets to play with the Jokers. At one point in the evening he was throwing the jokers back on to the poker table. Uncle Andrew folded those cards in half so that they would know which cards they were and they wouldn't get mixed in with the rest. As you can imagine, Benjamin was NOT happy and yelled at Uncle Andrew for breaking his cards.
For the rest of the weekend he would tell me about how he was mad at Uncle Andrew. A few days later (as we were getting ready for a funeral) Benjamin walked into the room and said, "I'm so mad at Uncle Andrew." Being that I am in a class about child discipline and communicating with your child, I decided to engage Ben in his feelings about his uncle.
"Why are you mad at Uncle Andrew?" I asked.
Ben's reply, "I'm really mad at him because he ripped my cards."
I knew that Andrew was home so I asked if he would like to call Uncle Andrew and discuss it. I really was interested in what he would tell his uncle. After a few minutes of telling Andrew how unhappy he was, he concluded the conversation with "I hate you, Uncle Andrew." That prompted my crisis mode and I quickly explained that we don't hate anyone - especially Uncle Andrew - and that was never an okay thing to say. We talked about it for a while longer and the issue settled. He hasn't talked about it since.
Tonight we read a devotion about how God heals our hurts - inside and out. I asked him if anything made him sad. He thought about it for a second and said, "I got really mad at Andrew when he tried to rip my cards."
Apparently, he hasn't given it up. And YES, Andrew, I have told him he needs to forgive you. I am NOT encouraging his anger!

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