On Bitterness Part I

I was sharing a story I heard last year with my best friend, and when I retold the story I had a different perspective. You know how we listen to a story from a woman who has been spurned, and most of the time we jump in with her as she bashes the person who broke her heart. But this time I saw her situation differently. Here are the characters: the wife, the husband, and the wife’s sister. To make a long story shorter (and a story I will share more in detail in a future book) the wife developed a chronic illness, and the husband chose to divorce her. When I heard the sister tell the story, she was still furious, and I can understand that. But here’s what made me reflect on the story differently. I respect the man who left. Not respect as in admiration, but respect as in understanding his reasoning and ownership of making a difficult choice. He decided that staying with his chronically ill wife was something he couldn’t handle, and he chose to exit stage left. My problem is that both women are holding onto the anger. Sure, it’s perfectly understandable to be angry at the betrayal and rejection, but who knows what God was protecting her from by allowing her husband to leave. As I reflect now on how angry the sister was on behalf of her chronically ill sister, now I am wondering how often she continues to feed into her sister’s anger. We do well being angry on our own, but what about when we have friends and family who entertain and feed into our vitriol with us? It only allows the anger to fester and then turn into bitterness. I started thinking about how this woman already has a chronic illness and now her soul is wounded, making it much more difficult to find some level of comfort and peace. I know that this is a horrible example of forgiveness, but isn’t that when we really need to forgive? The deeper the betrayal, the deeper the wound. The deeper the wound, the bigger need to let the wound go. If we don’t we slowly poison our lives with bitterness. Yes, I said “our” lives because as many of us know the offender often goes onto live happily while the injured party ceases to live life fully. Let’s not let that be how our story ends.