In the summer of 1975, my friends and I built a treehouse in a large tree located in an open field near our homes. This was the best place to be a kid. All of the neighborhood hung out there.
During that same summer, there was a developer who was trying to acquire the land with the intent to build manufactured homes. Most of our parents were against the idea since all their homes were standard construction and it would have a negative effect on their property values.
Just a few days before school was to start, early that morning my best friend knocked on our door at around 8am and was very upset. We don’t know how it was done, but during the night, our tree house had been burned down. The theory among all our parents was that the developer had done it as a form of retaliation. About a year later, my family moved to Nebraska.
Fast forward 12 years, and my parents had just moved back to that same neighborhood in Utah. I was in college and had come home for the summer. I had gone to church that first Sunday and was looking for old friends and anyone I could remember. The man sitting in front of me was somewhat familiar, but I just couldn’t figure out how I knew him. After about 10 minutes it hit me. He was the developer who had burned down my treehouse!
For the rest of the service, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Whatever good feelings I had at the beginning, were gone. I tried to focus on the sermon or even just anything else, but I couldn’t.
I realized right then that the issue was mine and not his. It was never proven that he had done it. Even if he did do it, that was 12 years ago and I was 9. I remember visiting with him a few times that summer and I came to see that he was a good man. It took most of the summer, but I was finally able to look at him without first thinking about that treehouse.
Throughout our lives, we can be offended and hurt by those around us. We often take those offenses and pick them up like rocks and put them in a backpack that we carry around with us for years, if not the rest of our lives. We will often pull them out and examine them like an old friend and then put them back to be revisited again later.
But over time, these can weigh us down. It’s not the offender’s fault that we keep them. We choose to keep them. In a way, it’s like we allow the offense to keep hurting us.
This Valentine’s Day, I would like to challenge you to review your backpack of “rocks” and see if there are any that you can find some forgiveness in your heart and drop that rock along the side of the road. Your backpack will be much lighter.
Mark D. Fullmer is Bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Gilroy Ward. He is an active member of the Interfaith Clergy Alliance of South County. Bishop Fullmer can be reached at [email protected]
