How to choose forgiveness over grievance

A Christian who tragically lost a son offers a profound lesson

Mark Bodnarczuk (right) with his son, Thomas.

In 2021, Mark Bodnarczuk’s son Thomas went to his bedroom for the evening. Feeling anxiety amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, he took a single dose of Xanax that he had purchased online.

Or at least that’s what he thought he was taking. The counterfeit pill actually contained a lethal dose of fentanyl. Thomas ordered DoorDash but never lived to eat it; he was dead within 20 minutes. The full story is recounted in Bodnarczuk’s memoir, Finding New Life After the Death of My Son.

The tragedy forced Mark, who worked at a high-energy physics lab at Stanford and who had a strong background in biblical studies, into a painful journey. But his message on grievance and forgiveness, which I heard at a recent church presentation, is as profound as any I’ve heard.

“The human heart,” Bodnarczuk says, “is a factory of grievance stories that get woven into our central narratives to explain our traumas.” He finds this susceptibility to grievance in Genesis 3. There, he notes, Satan told a partial truth (that God knew their eyes would be opened to good and evil if they took a prohibited action), accused God of denying Adam and Eve access to a perfectly good tree, assured them that they would not die, and persuaded them that God was not treating them fairly. The deceiver undermined their trust in God, with disastrous results.

Drawing from Fred Luskin’s book Forgive for Good, Bodnarczuk described three typical steps toward creating a grievance story:

1. We take real and perceived offenses too personally, viewing them as something that has uniquely happened to them rather than as similar to what millions of others have experienced. Moreover, we assume that our offenders acted intentionally to harm us, dismissing the possibility that miscommunication, stress, or personality type may have been a factor.

2. We blame others for what happened and expect others to do something to fix things. By blaming others, we fall into either dependency (i.e., we cannot become whole again unless the other person does something) or vengeance, where we take matters into our own hands. We see this pattern in Adam blaming Eve and Eve blaming the serpent. In this conception, the problem is always “out there,” not within ourselves.

3. We embrace our grievance story by telling it to ourselves and others repeatedly. Quite possibly, Adam and Eve shared their grievance story with their children. That might be why, within eight verses of Genesis 4, Cain had adopted his own grievance story and killed his brother.

The way to break the grievance cycle is forgiveness, which Jesus considered so important that he embedded our obligation to forgive in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer: “If you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive other people, then your Father will not forgive you (Matthew 6:14–15).

Bodnarczuk proposes six steps to transform grievance stories into something meaningful rather than destructive:

1. Don’t let a grievance story fester in your heart and mind until it emerges when you least expect it to do so. Look on the offending person as a fallible human being, not a villain.

2. Get into the “spectator role,” which Charles Dickens masterfully illustrated in A Christmas Carol. When Ebenezer Scrooge saw his past, present, and future self from a distance, the perspective of objectivity transformed his heart and mind. Similarly, by using your imagination to step outside yourself into the spectator role, you can view your situation more objectively and observe, explore, reject, and refuse to act out your negative feelings.

3. Absorb the loss that resulted from the offense and refuse to take vengeance (Romans 12:19).

4. Recognize that forgiveness does not mean forgetting what happened or denying the pain. It does not require you to reconcile with the offender. It does mean that it is not your job to punish the offender or impose consequences.

5. If you apply these principles, you will see evidence of true transformation in your life when you find yourself in a situation that previously would have generated a grievance story and it no longer does.

6. Replace the old grievance story with a truthful one.

In Bodnarczuk’s case, rejecting grievance meant showing mercy to the defendant who had unwittingly sold Thomas the fatal pill by hugging and forgiving him in the lobby outside the courtroom.

Under California law, the district attorney could not prosecute the defendant for Thomas’s death. Bodnarczuk encouraged the district attorney to prosecute the defendant justly for the five felonies he was charged with, related to the possession and transport of fentanyl and Xanax. He was sentenced to one year in a county jail and two years of probation; he was released in six months.

Once Bodnarczuk forgave the defendant for causing Thomas’s death, his heart and mind were cleansed of anger and the desire for vengeance. Today, five years later, Bodnarczuk refuses to descend into bitterness despite losing his son to “a single choice made within the Zeitgeist of a cold, calculating, deceptive, unforgiving, and evil world.”

At the end of the presentation I attended, Bodnarczuk said, “I haven’t had an angry or vengeful thought about him since.” Examine your own life and see if you have any grievance stories you need to deal with before they hurt yourself and others more deeply.

A bonus forgiveness story

Ironically, the most powerful story of Christian forgiveness I’ve ever seen appeared in a secular academic book, In the Shadow of Death: Restorative Justice and Death Row Families (Oxford University Press, 2007). One chapter tells the story of William Neal (Billy) Moore, sentenced to death for killing an elderly man during a 1974 house burglary. Moore became a Christian in prison, and the victim’s family members not only forgave him but began advocating for his pardon. One family member testified before the pardon board, “This is our brother Billy and you can’t kill him. We’ve lost one family member and we’re not going to lose another. We don’t want you to execute him.” Even Mother Teresa called pardon board members on his behalf.

Moore was released from prison in 1991. Since then, he has told his story of transformation far and wide.