One morning as Gus was getting the food bus set up for the day, a man came running to the food bus and he was very excited!
He yelled, “Help me please! I am camping in the hills and last night there was a gust of wind that blew my tent against the rocks. Now there is a big tear in the side of my tent, and I think it might rain tonight! I do not have any money, and no one will help me!” Gus was compassionate and wanted to help the man, so he gave the man a new roll of duct tape and told the man there was no charge, but to bring back whatever tape he did not use.
The man promised that he would bring back the rest of the tape.
Later that morning when Gus was very busy selling food, the man came back and interrupted Gus as he was talking to customers. The man yelled, “I lost the duct tape!
I stopped to look at a pretty flower and set the tape down onto a rock. The tape slid off the rock and began rolling down the hill! I chased it for a while, but the tape kept rolling faster and faster and then bounced off a big rock and landed in a river! Could you please give me another roll of duct tape, this time I promise I will be more careful!” Gus was beginning to get a bad attitude towards this man, but Gus knew that God would want him to help the man,
so he gave him another roll of duct tape and told him to bring back the extra tape when he was finished. Again, the man promised that he would.
Later that afternoon, when Gus was cooking a large order of grilled cheese sandwiches,
the man again came running up to the food bus and again he was very excited! The man yelled, “I lost the tape again! I was almost back to my tent when I walked around the corner of a tall rock,
and there was a mother bear and her cub! The mother bear thought that I would hurt her cub, so she came at me to attack me! I scrambled up that rock as quick as I could and fortunately it was tall enough and the sides were smooth enough so that the bear could not get to me! When I had scrambled up the rock, I dropped the duct tape and it rolled to the bear cub. The cub started playing with it and put his paw through the roll of tape! It got stuck on his front leg, and it was still stuck there when the mother and the cub wandered off. I need another roll of duct tape!” Just then, smoke began coming out of the windows of the food bus!
The grilled cheese sandwiches were ruined! Now Gus was angry with this man, but the man kept begging for more tape,
and Gus gave him a new roll just to get rid of him! Again, Gus told the man to bring back the extra tape, and the man promised that he would.
Gus did not see the man again. The man broke his promise and did not bring back the extra tape! Gus was very angry with the man and wanted to do something to get even with him and teach him a lesson!
That night Gus’ conscience was bothering him. He knew that God would not want him to be so angry at this man, but he did not know how to stop his angry feelings. Then Gus remembered that in the Bible Jesus told a parable about forgiveness.
Gus looked in his Bible and in Matthew 18:21-35 he read what Jesus said:
Then Peter came to Him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?” “No, not seven times, “Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!
Therefore, the Kingdom of Heaven can be compared to a king who decided to bring his accounts up to date with servants who had borrowed money from him. In the process, one of his debtors was brought in who owed him millions of dollars. He couldn’t pay, so his master ordered that he be sold – along with his wife, his children, and everything he owned – to pay the debt.
But the man fell down before his master and begged him, ‘Please, be patient with me and I will pay it all.’ Then his master was filled with pity for him, and he released him and forgave his debt.
But when the man left the king, he went to a fellow servant who owed him a few thousand dollars. He grabbed him by the throat and demanded instant payment. His fellow servant fell down before him and begged for a little more time. ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it,’ he pleaded. But his creditor wouldn’t wait. He had the man arrested and put in prison until the debt could be paid in full.
When some of the other servants saw this, they were very upset. They went to the king and told him everything that had happened. Then the king called in the man he had forgiven and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave you that tremendous debt because you pleaded with me. Shouldn’t you have mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had mercy on you? Then the angry king sent the man to prison to be tortured until he had paid his entire debt.
That’s what my heavenly will do to you if you refuse to forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.”
Gus read the verses several times, but he had a hard time believing these verses. Was he really supposed to forgive that man? What about justice, what about fairness? Then Gus remembered some other verses that he had read in the Bible.
He found those verses in Romans 12:19-20:
Dear friends, never take revenge. Leave that to the righteous anger of God. For the Scriptures say, “I will take revenge; I will pay them back,” says the Lord. Instead, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals of shame on their head.”
Gus wrote in the Gus-Bus Eternal Journal:
This is a hard lesson to learn! I am supposed to forgive people even when they do things that made me angry. I am not supposed to think about revenge or getting even, I am supposed to let God take care of that. That is so hard to do, I really do not want to do this, but if I want to live God’s way, I need to do this!
The point of the whole parable is that God forgave all my sins! When I think about how often I have failed God, and yet he forgave me for everything, then I realize that the things that others do to make me angry are so small in comparison. God help me to forgive others, I want to please you!