Rejecting Bitterness

Your words can be as satisfying as fruit, as pleasing as the food that fills your stomach. The tongue can speak words that bring life or death. Those who love to talk must be ready to accept what it brings. (Proverbs 18:20-21)

Fruit can have all the right coloring, smell wonderful, but somehow it is just too tart or bitter on the inside. It is like the development of the fruit arrested and it never came to the place it was fully ripe - like when it is picked too quickly and artificially ripened to put on the shelves at the supermarket. Take a bit of the fruit and you will soon realize the bitterness lasts, even when you spit out the nastiness of the bite you took. It is like "having your teeth set on edge". Some of us don't taste "bitter"? In fact, depending upon the level of dietary iodine we may ingest, we might all sense "bitterness" a little differently. I wonder if this difference with how we "taste" the bitter we ingest in life is similar to how some may be deeply affected by the hurtful and bitter things another does or says, while others seemingly walk away pretty well unaffected by it?

There are individuals who will take in a steady diet for a while, developing a "taste" for whatever it is they are given to ingest. It may not have been pleasant at first, but the more they ingest it, the more immune they become to the unpleasant taste. It is kind of like when you first tried to feed your infant veggies - they didn't like their taste as well as the fruit, so they squirmed away when you tried to coax them to take a little more. The pediatrician might even tell you to start with veggies and leave the fruits till last. You are convincing them to "take in" what is the least pleasant for them, but which will give them the necessary stuff to help them grow up strong. They might not enjoy the experience, but it is not going to kill them!

I wonder how many of us go through life "not enjoying the experience", but going through it anyway simply because someone has convinced us it won't "kill us". The reality is that we are affected by all which comes into our lives - good, bad, sweet, or bitter. We cannot deny the influence of each of these - some will be quite enjoyable and easily appreciated; others will be very difficult and quite difficult to see as valuable. There are times when bitterness is all around us, and all we want to do is spit it out! We rarely crave the bitter taste. In time, the more we taste the bitter, the more our taste buds will become desensitized to the bitter and will actually allow us to take it in without having that same "teeth set on edge" reaction.

What has happened? We have been "desensitized" due to the frequency of the exposure to the bitter thing. That which once caused us so much discomfort becomes something we are almost immune to now. This is not always good, though, because those initial reactions of "rejecting" the bitter are there for a reason. The bitterness of the green fruit is what should keep us from ingesting it and becoming ill from taking it into our bodies. When we develop a tolerance to the bitter, we often go way beyond a place of safety when it comes to what we will allow into our lives! Spiritually and emotionally speaking, the bitterness of life is going to challenge us a bit at first, but when we are continually bombarded by it, we cannot help but develop a "tolerance" to it.

Words might be bitter when first spoken, producing an immediate "ill-effect". In time, when we are constantly bombarded by the sheer volume of bitter and harmful words, or words which ought to produce a bitter taste within us, we might just begin to develop a tolerance to what we continue to allow to be taken in! This is perhaps why God asks us to pay so close attention to the words we speak and those which we allow to penetrate our minds and hearts. These very words can be the starting point of tolerance to the bitterness of life - rather than us rejecting that which produces bitterness within, we actually find ourselves running toward it! We need to weigh our words carefully and those which we will allow to "penetrate" our minds and hearts. When we hear those bitter words of another, we need to be quick to reject those as something which is just not "fitting" for our lives. Just sayin!

Do you have a rumination partner?

I caught a little quote from Positive Mind this morning on someone's social media feed and it gave me a moment to just consider the message: "If you focus on the hurt, you will continue to suffer. If you focus on the lesson, you will continue to grow." I don't always remember to focus on the lesson, do you? Sometimes it is just easier to focus on the hurt and let that ruminate a bit. Problem is that ruminating just increases the amount of 'acidic influence' of the hurt. Maybe what we need most is someone in our lives that won't let us ruminate our way into a bitter heart!

Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many. (Hebrews 12:15)

God actually commands us to 'watch out' for the root of bitterness - not just in ourselves, but in each other, as well. We are sometimes more sensitive to someone's 'ruminating' than they are themselves. It is easy for the one doing the ruminating to focus on the hurt repeatedly but be totally oblivious to what all that ruminating is actually doing to their spirit, emotions, and their bodies. When we have an accountability partner in our lives, there is a good chance they will 'call us' on our behavior. When they do, it is time to 'spit out' that stuff we have been ruminating on and rid ourselves of all that foulness that goes along with it.

The bad part of bitterness is that it never just affects us - it affects all those around us. Sometimes I think we justify our 'hurt feelings' a bit too easily, allowing that rumination to begin. We were wronged, even if no one else sees how 'wronged' we were, so we are going to focus on just how wronged we were over and over again. If someone else is willing to listen to us list all the ways we were wronged, all the better. When we share the hurt with another who is not going to encounter us about our focusing on the hurt instead of the lesson and we will find ourselves with a 'rumination partner'!

We are to look after each other - so not one of us fails to receive the grace God has for us in the hurt. The lesson comes with an ample supply of grace - the grace to let it go, the grace to forgive the other person, and the grace to rebuild the relationship once again. When we have an accountability partner, they focus us on the grace that is available, while the rumination partner focuses us on just how 'right' we are to be ruminating in the 'wrong' done to us. We need a partner who consistently points us toward grace and away from the 'rumination pit'! These are the individuals that help us change our focus from the hurt toward the lesson. Just sayin!