FORGIVENESS ROCK-another humiliating and hilarious story

A few years ago I was serving in the Primary and I was in charge of presenting sharing time.  The theme I was to address was about forgiveness so I planned to use to the story about the man who puts a rock in his pocket every time someone does something mean to him or makes him mad.  He carries those rocks around so he can remember all the reasons to be angry with people.  The rocks have a negative effect on him and begin to weigh him down and fill his house just like when we don’t forgive others. 

I decided I would use a backpack and fill it with rocks so that the kids could see how heavy being unforgiving gets.  While at Bear Lake I collected boulders of all sizes and wrote on them with permanent marker things that would be hard to forgive for children and adults.   I put such things as; “friend broke my favorite toy,” “friend said something mean about me to other people”, “had an argument with spouse”, “friend pushed me and made me fall and scrape my knee”, “teenager told me a lie about how the car got damaged”, “church leaders offended me with their counsel” etc. etc. 

I had one child put the backpack on and called up other children one at a time to pick a rock and read it and then put it in the backpack.  The child holding the backpack quickly got weighed down with the heaviness of the rocks.  By the time all the rocks were in there he couldn’t walk at all and the backpack looked like it wouldn’t hold.  Anyway it was a very effective forgiveness sharing time and went well for all ages. 

Well that is only a small part of this story.  Many weeks later we were headed to our favorite town parade with my parents, sisters and their families.  I needed to save our spot on the street with a blanket and it was pretty breezy so I grabbed some of those boulders to set in the corners of the blanket.  The parade was delightful and when it was over I asked my kids to make sure we got all our belongings and the rocks.  They assured me we had and we headed to our car. 

The next day I got a phone call from my brother in law telling me that one of my rocks had been left behind and caused a stake president and his first counselor a sleepless night!  Panic filled my heart as I listened to him recount the happenings of his early morning meeting with the stake presidency. 

As the high council began their meeting,  the stake president set a large rock on the table with writing on it that said, “my church leaders offended me with their counsel.”  He said, “Brethren we have offended someone and we have to get to the bottom of this.”  He recounted finding  the rock in his yard the previous evening, reading it and quickly taking it over to his counselor’s house to show it to him.   He worried that someone had tried to throw it at his house.  The two of them spent most of the night trying to figure out what member of their stake it could have been.  One of them even made a list of possibilities and went through it name by name trying to remember exact conversations and interactions. 

As soon as my brother-in-law saw the rock he knew where it had come from and quickly let him know that is was a very big misunderstanding and I was the owner of the rock.

He took a picture of the stake president holding the rock and sent it to me.  By then apparently the story was funny but it took weeks for it to be funny to me.  I felt so horrible.  I made brownies and wrote a note of apology and delivered them that evening with the intention to leave them on the doorstep and RUN!  Just as I laid them on the porch the stake president opened the door.  Oh the humiliation!

The incident was handled with such kindness and humor and I was so thankful for the forgiveness I received for leaving the “forgiveness rock” in his yard!