“Screaming….” A sudden, fearful flashback causes Rick to wince. All the yelling and verbal attacks generate a sizeable jagged rock.

“Hurting my mother….” His father’s grating emotional and verbal abuse sends a sizeable sandstone dropping into the bag. 

 “Get out of my sight!…” His devaluing, denigrating words propel a big hefty boulder.

“Rejection….” sums up the emotional impact of all his father’s wounding. Momentum drives a very large, hard rock into Rick’s bag. It crashes against the other rocks inside, leaving some small, sharp-edged fragments. Jagged pieces are painfully wedged in Rick’s memory. Ultimately, rejection says it all.

Expanding on the visual, I tell Rick he has a bag of rocks residing in his soul. For years he has been hauling rocks of resentment, stones of hostility, and boulders of bitterness. Then I point to the bag hanging from the hook around his neck—the burlap now straining from the weight of the rocks.

"What would happen if you were to keep walking around with that bag of rocks hanging onto your hook the rest of your life?”

He immediately responds, needing no time to think, “I wouldn’t be able to run anymore.” I am surprised and glad at his answer. Instead of saying, “I would become bent over,” or “It would be difficult to walk,” Rick, the devoted athlete, expresses concern that he could no longer run.

His response articulates so well the cost of failing to get rid of cumbersome “rocks.” Think of all the scriptures that refer to running. The apostle Paul says, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.” And he asked, “You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth?”  

What Rick said from a physical standpoint—“I wouldn’t be able to run anymore”—is just as true emotionally and spiritually. Weighed down by too many rocks, the best we would be able to do is trudge our way through life. If more rocks are added to the pile, we’ll barely be able to move forward. And if even more rocks are thrown on the heap, we will completely collapse under the weight.  

But when we learn to forgive—even when we don’t feel like it—we get rid of the rocks dragging us down and depleting our strength. As we work through the process of forgiveness, we are set free from the pressure of the strain…we feel unshackled…we feel released…we feel free!

 The prophet Isaiah describes what this freedom is like: “They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.”  

Now back to Rick: The last thing I want to do is leave this wounded young man weighed down by emotional pain. I want to see him run!

 “Rick, do you want to live the rest of your life carrying all this pain from your past?”

 “No, I don’t.”

 “Then are you willing to take all the past pain off of your hook and place it onto God’s hook?”

 "Yes, I am.”

 “Would you be willing to take your father off of your emotional hook and place him onto God’s hook?”

 “Yes, I want to.”

 In prayer, we both go before God’s throne of grace. “Lord Jesus,” I start.

 “Lord Jesus,” he echoes, “thank You for caring about my heart… and how much I’ve been hurt…You know the pain I have felt… because of my father’s treatment…his anger…his lack of affection… his abuse…his rejection.”

 All of a sudden, throughout the crowd, the unexpected occurs. As Rick repeats the prayer, making it his own, an undercurrent of prayers—barely above a whisper—waft across the room. Goose-bumps rise on my arms. Feeling a holy sense of awe, I realize that on this day, more than one bag of rocks is soon to be empty.