Post by Pastor Tim – On a daily basis, we encounter situations in which we need forgiveness or in which we need to offer forgiveness.  Take for example, a situation that we discussed in church this past Sunday.  A mother and her daughter related a story in which the daughter responded inappropriately to her mother.  Specifically, the daughter who was responsible for cleaning the kitchen didn’t clean properly, and when she was confronted with this fact, she responded defensively instead of humbly accepting her mother’s correction.

You might be thinking, why reference such an insignificant case of sin in relation to forgiving and reconciling?  Why not focus on something a little bigger and harder to forgive?  Quite simply, because these are the types of everyday encounters that we have to be willing to learn and grow from.  Otherwise, we are apt to continue repeating the same patterns of sin and unforgiveness that we first experienced, even though they were only experienced in a so-called “insignificant” event.

As a part of Offering Sunday, we focused on those “daily forgiveness encounters” by role-playing them in front of each other.  The above story was reenacted twice, one time with the way it really happened and the other time with the way it should have happened had humility and forgiveness been involved.  By reenacting this in front of the congregation, it not only enabled the mother and daughter to learn from their situation, but it caused everyone else to reflect and examine some of their own “daily forgiveness encounters.”

My own family began to think about a “forgotten backpack at school” situation in which both my wife and my son had reactions that were not conducive to forgiveness.   My son forgot his backpack, which of course is not a sin, but he specifically withheld this information from my wife, until it became too late and difficult to get the backpack that day.  When confronted with his sin, he became defensive and prideful instead of humbly asking for forgiveness and recognizing that he needed help in retrieving his backpack.

Role-playing real-life “forgiveness encounters” like these can accomplish a number of positive results.  First, it can give you the much needed perspective of the other person who was involved in the situation.  Second, it can give you a better understanding of your own actions. And by taking the time to examine these mundane “forgiveness situations,” it also helps you to plan how to respond better in the future.  In fact, my own family was able to use the lessons we learned in church, later that very same day.

As a church, we role-played a number of situations on Sunday, and one of those situations involved a problem that one of our younger members was experiencing out on the playground.  I wanted to share a short clip of our church reenacting this.  You’ll notice that we aren’t Broadway trained and our video is rather grainy.  But these things aren’t really so important.  It’s much more important to have a willingness to laugh at yourself a little bit, a willingness to learn and a willingness to be humbled and forgive as a result of what you’ve learned.