Bitter

 To be bitter means to be angry, hurt, and resentful because of one's bad experience or unjust treatment. There are a lot of bitter people in the world today. Bitter toward their parents or grandparents. Bitter toward siblings. Bitter toward friends. Bitter toward co-workers. Bitter toward enemies. 

People carry this bitterness night and day. It eats at them. It impacts their physical, mental, and emotional health negatively. People still choose to cling to bitterness. Seething in anger and resentment. Sometimes the people others are angry at and resent are oblivious to this fact. They are not even aware of the bitterness. It does not impact their lives at all, while on the other hand, it destroys the bitter person inside. 

This impacts new relationships too. Bitter people will be more guarded, quicker to judge, and less trusting in a new relationship. They will project the actions of the one who hurt them onto the new relationship without cause sometimes. 

There is no healthy justification for hanging onto bitterness. We are told in [Eph 4:31] to put bitterness away from us. Some choose to embrace it. This is a direct violation of scripture. Bitter people are angry, resentful and miserable. I know. I carried bitterness deep inside for a long time. 

Without going into graphic details, I was sexually abused as a child and physically abused too. It made me a very angry child and teenager. I was untamable in my anger and fought a lot. My mother could not make me behave. Neither could my grandparents with whom we lived. Coaches and teachers could not either. I grew up angry and bitter toward many people. 

I got challenged on this while preaching a revival. Jesus saved me when I was 17 but I did not let go of my bitterness then. My great uncle held revival services in the church he pastored. He asked me to come preach them. Over dinner one evening after services he and my aunt asked why I didn't smile more and seemed so angry in the pulpit. This opened the door for a conversation about my childhood. They learned many things that wrongfully and shamefully happened to me as a child. I also learned that I was lied to all my life about who my father was. This information only angered me more. 

They both challenged me to forgive them. I went back to my hotel wrestling with their counsel. I took out a notepad and made a list. 27 names were compiled on that list. Most were family. Some were cantankerous church members who had lied about me. One by one I prayed through that list. Some had already died. I wrote letters to many of those people. The ones who were dead I still wrote to get the bitterness out of my heart. Then I crumbled the paper and threw it in the trash. I mailed the other letters to the living ones. God brought freedom to my soul. He replaced the bitterness with forgiveness. God broke the bondage of bitterness that held me captive for decades. 

Who are we not to forgive others no matter what they have done? God in Christ forgave us. [Col 3:13] We certainly did not deserve it. He gave it freely. He exhorts us to do the same for others. May God melt the bitterness in our hearts and replace it with liquid love where grace flows.