The Antidote to Bitterness

Hello friend,

Imagine the surprise one feels upon discovering that a root of bitterness has grown in one’s life.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how it happened because I don’t equate the process of grief to bitterness. During my year long lament after mom died I remained soft and close to God. The intimacy and richness of that relationship during that time of outer space still surprises me. Cliche phrases like “God is near the brokenhearted” are correct, although another way to say it is “God takes the broken into his heart.” An otherworldly beauty marks that period of time for me making me wonder if I truly was living half in heaven and half with my cross. It was hell and it was heaven. You can’t combine those two, only here on earth sometimes we end up with impossible reality.

This time last year I wrote a todo in my planner entitled “you need to grieve tonight.” It was Monday, October 3, 2022 and a dump truck had just unloaded on my body. I was still too young at grieving to know right away that the body knows things before your mind and heart catches up. I went home and cried my eyes out and made it to Thursday. Friday I got to work and remembered it was mom’s birthday. (Finally around Christmas I figured out that my body would tell me about a week before an anniversary would hit if I was too busy or preoccupied to know it was coming with my mind).

I don’t think I’ve ever had a harder day at work, except for maybe the day I had to return to work after the funeral. It was awful. I had to keep a strict control over myself all day. The body is the main carrier of grief and I am still paying for it with my physical health. Yet also, there is a resilience in humans that means our hearts can be broken and we can yet arise.

It’s mom’s birthday this weekend, a year later, and when I publish this, we will be sorting through her clothes back home in Michigan. I cleaned my own closet out last Saturday because, as I told my sister, no one is going through this when I die. Unless that is tomorrow, I want to leave instructions for what to do with my house and personal effects. Of course mom didn’t know she was going to die, except I sometimes think she actually did, just not in enough time to do anything with her wardrobe, pantry, and sewing room. To be fair to her, she was good at keeping things purged; it’s just easy to accumulate.

Walking into dad and mom’s house Monday night after a frigid February flight to Michigan the day after her death was maybe the hardest thing I have ever had to do, second only to seeing my dad the first time after mom died. I could hardly walk inside. I was supposed to have come in two days and have coffee with her. That was the plan.

Somehow I survived that week. My Race of Joseph friends texted me on Wednesday before the funeral to tell me they were coming, and I laid down on my brother’s brown suede couch and the tears dripped silently on the fabric. I couldn’t believe they came. They came, as did my boss and his sister, and my sister-friend and her husband, and other dear friends from Michigan. They came.

I felt that way about many people who walked through the door. They came.

But, gratitude or even friendship is not the antidote to bitterness, though it is important. I never got anywhere fighting grief with gratitude, in fact I never got anywhere fighting grief. It’s too big for me.

My lament ended a few weeks short of the anniversary of mom’s death. A switch flipped. I am not sure exactly why but it had something to do with hearing Jesus say “for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” I gave him the grief, and a few weeks later the worst of it was gone. That’s not a formula or a dodge for grief. The lament was necessary, but there is a time to grieve and a time for reprieve. It was time and Holy Spirit told me.

After that the bitterness set in. I thought the most dangerous time for me was navigating deep grief, but it has not compared with the temptations of the “now what.” The time to feel the implications of lost dreams and hopes that had to do with this earth. I was empty and hideously scarred in my spirit. For months and months I lived as the lowest of the low. Not worth anything, not worth anyone, and not worth living. Not suicidal, but with no reason to live. I wanted to cultivate friendships, but what could I bring to them? I wanted to testify to God’s faithfulness but couldn’t to his goodness. Not honestly. A broken and ravaged human. Even as I surrendered to God over and over, I knew that something was terribly wrong with me. Still I willed myself to be ok.

Human will is both amazing and crippling. Not for nothing are we made in the likeness of God. In his will we are made complete, but in ours we white-knuckle it. Even as I write, I am not sure what I could have done differently. The bills had to be paid. The house had to be taken care of - meals made. I could not slide into that unwise state of grief where I stopped living, and yet it wasn’t truly living either. Some of it I navigated with faith and grace, but much more of it was awful desperation. In our lives sometimes we face something so much bigger than us that we think we have to counter it with grit and resilience. We do have to have grit and resilience, but it cannot help us long term. Grit and resilience last for a time but will lead us to temptations. Grace and forgiveness lead to life.

I grit my teeth often and literally. The dentist said “ you need a mouth guard.” I thought to myself, “I need a guard.” Hope was far from me. It was around May I admitted that life was hopeless. I had Jesus, but he was somehow separate from my circumstances as someone too good to be in this. I needed him inside my life. Soon after, social media and I parted ways for awhile. I couldn’t handle the short form advice columns or the fact that with very few exceptions, even people who have struggles, have things I don’t get to have. My coping mechanisms were gone and it was ringingly clear to me that beauty, coffee, gardens, triumphant stories, adventurous stories, sad stories, weak stories, broken stories, and food were empty. They had been tried and found wanting. Even friendships had not supplied all I needed. This is to no fault of anything or friends. They were lovely and it is ok to find delight in life and good things, or to share wisdom.

My physical life had lost all meaning and like Naomi my spirit cried “call me Mara, for my name is bitter.”

Jesus had to be real, he had to be. If he wasn’t I was done for. It was a year now since I had lived in this place. All my chips were cast and if Jesus did not come through then neither would I. As Arwen in Lord of the Rings my fate was bound to the king.

He was in my heart but not my life. Holy Spirit was in me, but my life was falling flat. The goodness of God was not evident to me. He was everywhere else, and in everyone else’s story, but my life remained empty. To live life as a hollow shell, merely going through motions, was killing me and my health continued to waver.

The more I perceived my life to be of lesser and lesser value, the more bitterness followed. My life was not good because God was not good to me. This is how my thoughts formed and I felt powerless to change. My place was way past the Christian cliche of “your feelings don’t have to bear witness to goodness for God to be good.” Of course that is true, but the implication is rebellion and I was broken hearted and completely worn out. I didn’t need to hear that my feelings were subjective. Of course they were. The issue was, is God real or isn’t he? Does he keep his promises, or doesn’t he? Is goodness something we get to see in this life, or am I doomed to this twilight zone of reality forever? Sometimes I would dream of what it would be like if God was good to me, then feel guilty because I shouldn’t need to taste and see that the Lord was good. But it was his inspired word that talks about it, not my idea, so I continued to think maybe it could be real goodness.

A mom is one of the key people that reminds you that you are also a body, by very nature of motherhood. It is she who has had the most physical contact with you in the nine months of pregnancy, and the loss of that can’t be calculated. I knew that Jesus was real spiritually, I knew him there, and I knew him in my heart. My spirit bore witness, but my body did not.

I needed a God that wasn’t just a spiritual entity “out there,” and one that wasn’t dependent on me being able to believe. I needed a body. I told a friend one day how close I was to slipping over the edge and she grabbed my shoulders and said, “let go.” You can’t control this.

One day something happened. I had enrolled as a Colson-Fellow-in-Training as a way to de-privatize my faith, but as has happened to more students before me, it was changing my faith. We had been studying major worldviews and the teacher had just gotten to theism, which I thought surely was the Christian worldview. Directly after he said, “and this is not the Christian worldview. Why?”

I couldn’t answer because this was uncharted territory for me. Either he or someone else (can’t remember) went on to say:

“The Christian worldview is that the One God, sent his only son to become a human baby. Emmanuel, God with us in the flesh.”

It is hard to tell about the sunrise from on high that Luke describes in the birth story, but I was in it. Somehow I was in this sunrise and the light spilling over the edges of the world touched my ravaged body. “The people who walked in great darkness have seen a great light.” “Mary pondered these things in her heart.”

Nine months of pregnancy.

The antidote to bitterness is not gratitude, it is not resilience, and it is not community (which is to say that we do need those things, but we need something else first). It is not a perfect understanding of doctrine, or a formula. It is not a people, a tribe or a tongue. It is simply:

Jesus.

He humbled himself.

Gave up his glory and dignity to take on human flesh

Born as a wee babe

Submitted to humans for parents, when he knew the Father in Heaven.

Tempted in all points as we are, and yet living… stainless.

Misunderstood.

Physically tortured

Mentally tortured

Emotionally tortured

Spiritually tortured

Abandoned.

Died a horrible death.

He rose up to life.

Jesus is real.

JESUS IS REAL IN THE FLESH.

My bitterness always ran up against a wall. If God is not good, then he would not have sent someone to save the world for motives of love and sovereignty. If I had sovereignty, I’d never use it that way. Only a truly good person or being would do that. It was like this unshakable barrier that would never let me get all the way to cynicism and despair.

One day I prayed, “God, make my experience small in the size of your love.”

Two days later I read a portion in J.I. Packer’s wonderful book “Knowing God” where he talks about how Jesus did not give up his divinity to become a man. He was fully God, fully man. The greatest miracle does not lie in the cross and resurrection; he still had the power to pay for sin in his death and to rise again because he was still omnipotent. He still had the divine attributes that were always his. The cross and resurrection are hugely significant, but when Packer begins to describe the greatest miracle of how Jesus gave up his glory and dignity to become a baby - a baby! I was a goner. I had never heard anything like the way he explained it, but I know now it was Holy Spirit working. In that flash of revelation I began to hope for the goodness of God again, because I needed God in the flesh, and he came. He came.

Since I have been dwelling in this place, soaking in the reality of Jesus who isn’t just a spiritual reality but also a physical one, my bitterness has been melting like snow in a warm, spring sunshine. What this has done for my identity is astonishing. I am human! I am human again! This isn’t the end of it, but a beginning. Maybe life isn’t always winter and never Christmas. Maybe I might yet get to see good things in my life. I had resigned myself to a life of slavery to drudging out the Christian life because I had committed come hell or high water, but maybe… maybe a little baby coming to earth with round, soft limbs and a small cry and groping hands is my salvation. Maybe there’s a little magic left in life for me, a spark of happiness and a thrill of hope.

This particular essay may not mean anything to anyone else. It may not touch you, which is ok. I wrote this for people who feel barely human. Who have become like Nebuchadnezzar, eating grass in the fields with wild hair and hearts. Squeezing all the goodness out of life with a vise-like grip trying to be ok. Don’t write a prescriptive for yourself. As often as it takes go back to read John 1, and then Luke 2, and then all of John.

God is restoring my humanity. I’m a human again. It’s been a long time since I felt the joy of being a human, alive in the world God made. All it took was the greatest miracle in the world, the Word became flesh. Like my flesh. This life which is so deeply physical and spiritual… he knew in all points. Any suffering I have experienced is also found in him.

If you’ve watched Lord of the Rings, you’ll remember Frodo waking up after that horrible journey to destroy the ring to a reunion of light with his friends. You’ll also remember that for Frodo life would never be quite the same again. He had seen evil and felt it in his body. He had received a wound of death. Until he went to the Gray Havens he would never be wholly well again.

For the one who has suffered through the Valley of Shadow of Death, you know this to be true. We heal, but we do not heal back. I am exploring the idea that maybe life can be redeemed and I can be happy, but it doesn’t seem likely that I can forget what it was like to be in the presence of my arch enemy. It is true that I have not had humans treat me with true evil, but it does not matter since we wrestle not against flesh and blood. There is a very real enemy, and something about becoming flesh and blood and giving that life in love, overcame him. The Valley of the Shadow of Death exposed evil to me and here, I believe, is the place where I can truly taste and see goodness and know.

Into that Valley of Shadow of Death God sent a baby. Let that soak in.

I can tell you this. I can’t wait for Christmas this year.

Love,

L. Raine

P.s. after a few days of letting the impact of Monday sink in, I have some questions. I was intent on grieving well, and failed that. Even with this question of bitterness before me, and knowing that it was not a good thing to become hopeless, yet I have determined that bitterness holds value in a human life. God had the Israelites eat bitter herbs to remember. There is difference between despair and hopelessness from a bitter spirit, and intentionally choosing to eat of this dish and yet worship God. As humans we pressure ourselves to be divine, and the hardest and slowest lesson I have ever partaken of is this body of flesh. Not God, but like him. Humbling myself to enter into this life I have and to give it in love.

LE

Photo provided by Emmeli M