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February 10 - March 25, 2025
Blaming and shaming the other person inside your mind over and over
When bitter feelings emerge, they’re usually tied to deep complexities of being hurt in deep ways, unfair ways, ways that changed so much about life, it’s almost inconceivable to believe that forgiveness is appropriate.
And the only legal revenge most of us have access to is resentment.
Usually the bitter heart is the heart with the greatest ability to love deeply. But when you love deeply, you are at the greatest risk of being hurt deeply. And when that deep hurt comes, it seems to cage the love that once ran wild and free. Caged love often has a bitter cry.
Perspective is the best fertilizer there is.
Marked moments of grief happen all around us every day.
We should treat every person we see as if they are walking through the left door. For if they have a beating heart, they are carrying loss of some kind. So be kind. Respect their loss. And, in doing so, it will make us more aware and soften our own propensity toward hardness.
Another Jewish tradition for mourning that is still very much being practiced today is “sitting shiva.”1 You sit shiva for all your first-degree family members: spouses, children, parents, and siblings. For seven days immediately following the burial of the deceased, family and friends come to the home of those grieving and sit shiva. They bring food and comfort and conversation and memories. Shiva allows space for those grieving to discuss their sorrow, hit pause on the normal rigors of life, be provided for and attended to by friends and family.
And with that, I choose to sit with it all. The pain of the loss. The sweetness of possibility. The guilt of how I’ve weaponized my grief and hurt others. The forgiveness of a compassionate Savior. The absolute acknowledgment of the unfairness of how I was wronged. The honesty that resentment hasn’t made anything better or more peaceful. The consideration of how to let tenderness in again.
Wrongs we deem were never made right are incredibly stealthy in their ability to sit, quietly seething, until that one more wrong done to us gives them permission to finally scream.
Resentment is usually attached to a specific person for a specific incident. Bitterness is usually the collective feeling of all our resentments.
But it was the one with resentment who wound up being most resistant to the father in the end. He was so consumed with what his brother had taken, he couldn’t see the bigger picture of what the father was doing.
Peace is a gift that God gives believers, and that gift is evidence to the world that we are different.
peace in my life isn’t being prevented by other people’s choices. It’s made possible by my choices.
Holding on to thoughts of resentment is like pulling a belt so tight across the middle of our thoughts that it prevents us from ever completely relaxing and resting and certainly makes future growth near to impossible.
Not forgiving someone isn’t teaching the other person a lesson, nor is it protecting you in any way. It’s making the choice to stay in pain. It’s ratcheting the already too-tight belt tighter and tighter with each remembrance. Undealt-with pain and a mind at peace cannot coexist.
Leaving room for God to work on them. Praying for the mercy of God. Seeking the face of God. Knowing the goodness of God. Living in the presence of God.
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”
The Lord’s Prayer reminds us what the human heart needs every day: we need God, we need to be forgiven, and we need to forgive.
Forgiveness is supposed to be as much a part of our daily lives as eating and sleeping.
Almost everyone would rather take a side than to bow their head and kneel in prayer.
And I would guess almost none of us are truly praying daily with confession and forgiveness like Jesus taught us.
want to truly be “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry” (James 1:19).
Feeling angry is different from living angry. Feeling offended is different from living offended. Feeling skeptical is different from living skeptical. Feeling wronged is different from living wronged. Feeling resentment is different from living resentful.
I’d once again remembered that I can’t expect a perfection in others I’m not even capable of living out myself. I need grace for my very human tendencies and so do others.
Maturity helps us see how hardships can add what’s missing in our development. Maturity helps us become more self-aware. Maturity helps us process with healthier perspectives. Maturity sets us up for healthier relationships. And maturity has a depth of empathy for others and a patience for imperfection that is less likely to get so easily offended.
Charles Spurgeon said, “To be forgiven is such sweetness that honey is tasteless in comparison with it. But yet there is one thing sweeter still, and that is to forgive. As it is more blessed to give than to receive, so to forgive rises a stage higher in experience than to be forgiven.”1
