July 5, 2026

Whew, I’m sure you already saw the title and were wondering what this is again. Lol, me too, but I couldn’t ignore the nudge that God wanted me to write about this today, especially with the title. And the unexpected way the inspiration for today’s post came to me told me it needed to be written.  With that said, welcome to Day 5. It’s five days into it, and I still can’t believe it. God really set me up with this challenge because I can already see where it is going. But beyond that, it’s the quiet release I feel in my spirit and in my soul. Writing this has been therapeutic for me. I needed this; I didn’t even know how much.  Back to my title, can you really forgive God? Isn’t that heresy? It’s not really in the phrase itself, but in the action we have to take. Have you ever kept a grudge against God? I have, and I’ll share why shortly. Before I get to that, it’s to explain what I mean by keeping a grudge with God. Many of us do it even if we have never acknowledged it either to ourselves or to God himself.  Let’s back it up with a little bit of definition. According to the dictionary, a grudge is a persistent feeling of resentment, bitterness, or ill will toward someone for a past offense or perceived wrong. Holding a grudge means you continuously harbor these negative feelings or refuse to forgive the person long after the initial event occurred. Does it bring it home now? A long-standing promise that God gave you but hasn’t come to pass, a loss of a loved one that shook you to your core, a life-threatening health situation that has left you thinking: Does God truly heal, or are they just some made-up stories of you losing everything and having to start all over again? These things happen to us, and no one ever tells us how to process it, but then, because we’re Christians and we don’t want to sound like we’ve backslidden, we either share with closed friends or even with God. So we suck up and continue to “worship and serve” God. But do we really suck it up? What I have found is that, if not addressed, our worship and service to God become like a veneer. In everyday language, “veneer” describes a pleasant outer layer that conceals something less desirable underneath. E.g “He maintained a veneer of calm, but he was actually panicking.” You can already see where I’m going with this. On the outside, even to ourselves, it looks like all is well with us and with our relationship with God. We minister to others, we preach the word, we sow our seed, we go to church, and we do our devotion. But underneath, deep down, is a trail of disappointment, of hurt, of thinking I really don’t want to trust God again because He keeps disappointing me, or God’s word is just there; it doesn’t really come to pass.  And for some of us, we continue with this, year or year, silently building resentment that we didn’t even know we were building, because we never got the outlet or permitted ourselves to express it.  What we don’t know is that God can actually take what we dish out to Him. Trust me, He is waiting for you to say, “God, I don’t really think you’re answering my prayers; this hurts,” or to ask the question as I did: “Why did my dad die? Why couldn’t you heal him?”  I didn’t know I was holding a grudge against God until the war broke out. And I discovered that I still had a gripe with God. I had lost my dad in 2020, and before that, he was diagnosed with stage 4 rectal cancer in 2019. You can already imagine the emotional turmoil. But what aggravated that resentment that I didn’t know was that because my dad passed just a day before they announced the lockdown, it meant that I couldn’t go for his burial, and I had to watch him get buried over a WhatsApp video call. To top that up, the last time I physically saw him or any of my family was in July 2015, the only time I went home. You can already paint for yourself the picture of what must have been going on in my mind. I had to mourn my dad alone. While I went back to my regular activities after a few weeks, nothing was the same anymore. And I didn’t even know it, because I didn’t take the time to express this to God; it was silently building up. The COVID year didn’t even help matters. But on the surface I was good—remember the veneer: I was a leader in church, I was going about my business; I was doing my “devotion,” but something was off, and I didn’t know. Fast-forward to February 2022, when I thought, Ok, life can start again, and then a war comes, and I find myself displaced. And I’m God; why are you doing this to me? Have I not gone through enough? How can you watch these things happen? Why didn’t you stop them? On and on, these thoughts would play out in my head. On the outside I was seen as “strong,” but I was drowning.  My biggest blessing in coming to Germany was the time I finally had to properly heal. The reason why God said Germany and not anywhere else I had family was because He knew I needed the come-to-Jesus moment. You remember that in my previous post that I started my German language in Feb 2023. While I moved places a few times until I finally settled, there was a lot of time on my hands. The isolation I was very angry about eventually became my haven. I had time to cry, I had time to rant, I had time to