Who me? Bitter?

Before I moved from Chicago to Montana, I began an “email friendship” with a gifted Christian conciliator in the Midwest. (We were both in the Peacemaker Ministries Conciliator Training Program at the time and we were sharing notes / encouragement / etc.)

Recently, this “spiritual father” emailed me this message and I thought it might bless you too. So (with his permission and changing identifying information to protect the stories of life that belong to others), here it is.

(Oh, and … Who me? Struggle with bitterness? Can you imagine why he would think this would be an appropriate encouragement and message for little ol’ ME? hah hah)

Dear Tara,

What you shared in your weblog and in your Peacemaker posts lead me to share three experiences with you. All of them relate to the temptation to bitterness.

Experience #1: Loss of My Professional Career
The first experience you already know about — my loss of the high-level professional position that I held for over 10 years. I won’t go into detail except to say that it involved a high publicity campaign involving smear tactics and betrayal by several people I had considered to be friends. The temptation to bitterness has been one of my major battles.

Experience #2: The Lost Inheritance
The second experience involves something that happened in my family. It bears some similarity to your situation, although I’m sure there are plenty of differences. I share it is because of the issue of bitterness.

A number of years ago, one of my ancestors married a widower with two grown children. They resented her for trying to take their mother’s place and were convinced that she married their father for his money. (He was well-do-do though not extremely wealthy by today’s standards.) Such animosity developed that he disowned his own children and cut them out of his will. They believed that this was her doing. Unexpectedly, their father died young. The estranged children contested the will. The children won at the trial level, but their victory was reversed on appeal. Most of the estate went to pay the attorneys’ fees.

Just a couple years ago, I got a phone call from one of these children’s children. She told me that her mother had just died and that all the remainder of her life (nearly 60 years from the date of the final court ruling), she was consumed by bitterness over losing her inheritance. Her hate and bitterness dominated and ruined her life. The situation was so bad that the granddaughter had to call me in order to learn where her grandfather was buried.

I actually met her mother once. She came to our home and asked my mother if she could have her father’s ring. My father gave it to her and said, “I thought all along that you should have it and I would have given it and more to you if had asked instead of fighting me in court.’ (I’m sure she would have told her where her father was buried, but she didn’t ask!)

Experience #3: The Birth Mother
The third experience is that of a brother in Christ. He knew he was adopted, and one day he decided he wanted to contact his birth mother. His adopted parents counseled strongly against it but he insisted. If nothing else, he wanted to share the gospel with her. Since he was an adult, they decided it was his decision to make so they gave him the information. When he made contact with her, he found her drunk. When he told her who he was, she came out with a barrage of profanities and obscenities and told him that he had ruined her life (no doubt it was his fault for entering her womb, right?)

A Few Thoughts on Combating Bitterness …
 The Christian brother was devastated by his encounter with his birth mother and didn’t know if he ever would recover. He told me that he finally was able to focus on the positives in his life and thanked God that a loving Christian couple adopted him and built a foundation which led to his conversion to faith in Christ.

The woman who was consumed by bitterness over her lost inheritance until the day she died. Her own descendants were still feeling the pain as it had spilled over into their lives.

I find that my own battle with bitterness over the loss of my professional position still affects my relationship with various people from time to time.

I really believe, though, that our biggest temptation is to be bitter with God. In His sovereignty, He could have shielded us from the pain but didn’t.

Lesson #1 in this regard is that I find that my bitterness against God at any given time (or lack of it) is a barometer of the extent to which I am currently living (or not living) by grace. Sound doctrine tells me that I deserve Hell, but when I’m bitter against God, I’m really believing that I deserve better at His hand than what He’s given me. It’s the opposite of living by grace. The only thing I know to do when I’m bitter against Him is to recognize it, confess it, repent of it, and resume living by grace. That sounds easy, but, of course, in the midst of pain, it’s not.

Lesson #2 is that the only way to live the Christian life of grace is to let Christ live it through us by faith. We cannot overcome. He can and already has. He was despised and rejected by men. His earthly brothers thought he was crazy. One of his disciples betrayed Him. The rest forsook Him and fled. One might expect Him immediately after His resurrection to have said, “Gabriel, bring me Anna, Caiphas, Herod, Pilate, the Roman soldiers that crucified me, the soldiers that scourged me, the disciples that abandoned me,…” But He didn’t!

You and I will fall apart quickly if we try to imitate His love. Only by believing by faith that He is in us and will express His love though us can we overcome the temptation to bitterness that wants to control us. I wish I could say that I am a great example of how to do this. All I can truthfully say is that sometimes I have experienced this.

Your friend,
Phil

PS
I thought it might be wise to add three thoughts to the comments I sent before …

The first thought is that I think we often make a mistake in asking God to send us various graces in various situations: “Lord, please give me love… joy… peace… patience… self-control,” etc. But these aren’t separate packages we obtain apart from receiving Christ Himself. Nor are they things He hasn’t yet given us. They are a part of the Person we received into our spirits when we received Christ — His love, his peace, His patience, His self-control, etc. We need to learn how to appropriate what He has already given us. These are all parts of Christ’s character which God gave to us when we were spiritually reborn.

The second thought is that we often make a mistake by asking God to draw upon these resources when we see the need for them, namely in crisis situations. But we don’t need Christ’s love (joy, peace, patience, etc.) flowing through us only when we are facing crises. We need it all the time, even in the “easy times” of life. Otherwise, we are spending most of our days living life in our own strength, thinking we only need Christ living through us when the going gets rough. This is terrible theology which deprives us of much fellowship with Him.

The third thought is that I wish I lived out the wisdom of the first two thoughts as well as I can explain them to others.