Bitterness II: Brokenness Precedes Beauty

“All discipline seems for the moment not joyful but sorrowful; yet afterwards it bears the peaceful fruit of righteousness…” - Hebrews 12.5-6

Human experience proves that bitterness finds fertile ground in the heart whose sense of justice has been violated. Literature offers countless examples to this effect.

The Yearling tells the story of a pioneer boy, Jody Baxter, and his attachment to a young fawn; but glance deeper and you will find a poignant meditation on human suffering and endurance: how the heart, in bitterness, mourns, before it slowly heals. From the beginning of the story we see that Jody’s mother is filled with bitterness. Not only does she refrain from embracing her son – nor showing any outward signs of affection – she can hardly look at him! Instead she is vexed, impatient, and perpetually displeased. Because Jody is a tender-hearted, imaginative child, we are surprised by her implacability; that is, until we learn that, before Jody, she buried three children. On the gravestone of her husband’s namesake, Ezra Jr., lies the inscription: He never saw the light of day. At once her bitterness and hardness of heart become, if not quite justifiable, then certainly understandable.

But while Mrs. Baxter’s story is exceptional in its severity, in principle it is not unique. As so often happens, God gives a gift; but either it is not the gift we wanted; or if it is, it is soon taken away or dies or turns out to be something else entirely from what we thought it was; in its place a new and different gift is given – not unequivocally or intrinsically better but better for us otherwise He would not have given it – and we reject it like a spoiled child at Christmas; we resent it and are affronted that God, in His supposed wisdom, would deign to give us something so cruel, so ill-suited to our talents and desires, so inferior to what we believe, at bottom, we truly deserve.

When I married I had precise, if latent, ideas about what conjugal life would be like. Youth and ignorance tend to travel in pairs and in my case it was no different: I vaguely anticipated we would undergo trials and, likewise vaguely, concluded that we would triumph over them. Yet no amount of pre-nuptial preparation could have fully equipped me for what actually occurred. Four days into our honeymoon, while winding through the sun-spattered roads of Napa Valley, we totaled our car; aside from two black eyes (mine) and a mild case of whiplash (his) we emerged uninjured, but this event marked the first in a stream of mishaps and failures that followed us throughout our early life.

Within six months, my dream of married life was shattered and a different, far less glittering picture had risen in its place. I felt not only disappointed; I felt cheated. Like any good home buyer, I had taken all necessary precautions. I took multiple tours and passed countless inspections; but now that I had moved in suddenly the roof leaked, the faucets dripped, the plumbing was bad, and in every room, from some unknown place, wafted the smell of mildew!

I found myself confronted with the usual questions: Had I done something to deserve such treatment? Was God trying to punish or destroy me? Worst of all, was He even listening? But the principal and underlying question was this: How can God possibly be good?

The author of Hebrews anticipates the fact that, very often, when we experience pain, hardship, or adversarial circumstances, we tend to draw back in some mixture of outrage, bitterness, and grief. Thus it is no accident that he places his caveat against bitterness directly after his discussion of Godly discipline, describing God’s ultimate purpose (our good) before addressing our natural predisposition (toward bitterness). He appeals to us to remember that whereas our earthly fathers “disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, …[God] disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness” (Hebrews 12.10).

Of course, if God is not good then we are right to feel horrification and dread; and we should take up Job’s lament when he says, “Thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth” (13.26).

But if He is good – as Scripture tells us over and over that He is – then we have no cause but to trust Him to perform the divine reconstructive surgery that will make us, in the end, not only more ourselves (without the gross obfuscations that sin begets), but more like Him.

I came to find – not immediately, but over time – that every pain brings with it a kind of divine favor; some heavenly instruction or supernatural and transformative gift. I learned, as Corrie ten Boom expresses, that “God never takes away; God only gives” (Tramp for the Lord).

In hindsight I can almost laugh – with gentleness and affection – at my younger self for failing to apprehend that most basic - and most extraordinary, unprecedented, and powerful – principle of the Christian faith: that God is good. I entrusted myself (past, present, and future) to Him and before long began to experience the character of God at work in my heart, setting into motion a kind of chain reaction: "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit…” (Romans 5.4-5).

Yet as I move from “faith to faith,” exchanging one trial for another, I often find it impossible to conceive – particularly when my wounds are fresh and the blood still flowing – that the God who created the Universe, who sent His only Son to cover the cost of my sin, is also working through my circumstances –in all their ugliness and ambiguity – to accomplish what is in my best interests; that He is, in short, taking those things which I find most humiliating and painful, and using them to make me perfect.

Instead, as my dear friend Jayne Berry put it, “In such moments we usually try to run from God, raising our fists to the sky to ask Him just who He thinks He is.”

But if we desire wisdom, we must remember that it was “for the joy set before him” that Christ “endured the cross, despising the shame…” (Hebrews 12. 2). The man of sorrows was no strangers to pain; he understood shame and humiliation; and yet He was able to “despise” it – translated from the Greek this means: “to think little or nothing of;” the same word used in Matthew 18.10 when Christ commands His disciples, “Take heed that ye despise [kataphroneo] not one of these little ones…” – because He knew that compared to what He was accomplishing, the shame was inconsequential.

At every moment we are faced with a choice: to submit to God’s authority or rebel against it; to accept our circumstances as Providentially chosen or reject them as flukes – random, arbitrary, and even cruel. As the character Maleldil says in C.S. Lewis’s science fiction chronicle, Perelandra, “You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of another” (italics mine, 59). And so we do – so I do – each time I fail to accept that God not only allows the circumstances that come into my life; but that He has planned them – painstakingly, tenderly – each and every one.

If we do submit we find, over time, that He takes of the formless void that is each man’s existence and makes of it a world unto itself – at once beautiful and teeming with life. God did not waste a moment before shattering my dream of married life; but He has – He is –in the process of assembling the broken pieces into an intricate design, like a stained glass window. After all, God is the original Artist and latent within his finest masterpieces is the idea that brokenness precedes beauty; that greatest intricacy proceeds from barest simplicity. A clear pane of glass may be functional; but it is also transparent: it does not bend the light nor shower its subjects with color.

In order to do so it must be broken and afterwards re-built.

Bitterness 1: A Failure to See the Big Picture

“See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of the bitterness, springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled:” - Hebrews 12.15

Anyone who has had any experience with bitterness knows that it is like cancer to the soul; swift, stealthy, and indiscriminate. Bitterness builds walls within the human heart faster than any artisan with brick and mortar. Above all, bitterness squelches life, like the thorny root that grows up amongst the flowering plant and silently chokes it. While taking a walk with my husband’s grandmother, Pearl, she said, “Bitterness is what happens when we take offense. Only it is we who become sick; not the person who offended us.”

The word “bitter” is a derivative from the Old English biter, or, bite, and is defined as “designating or having a sharp, often unpleasant taste;” bitterness is that state which is “characterized by strong feelings of hatred, resentment, cynicism” (Webster’s New World). The word in Greek is pikria meaning: 1) bitter gall; a) extreme wickedness; or b) a bitter root, and so producing a bitter fruit.

Scripture is ripe with examples of individuals who struggled with bitterness. In obedience to the Lord, the prophet Jeremiah preached repentance to the Israelites during the Babylonian exile; as a result he faced tremendous persecution, compelling him to write, “He [God] hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood” (Lamentations 3.15).

Because she could not conceive a child Hannah “[was] in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and wept sore” (1 Samuel 1.10).

Job is perhaps most obvious biblical example of someone who, by human standards, had just cause for bitterness. In the wake of devastating losses – his health and assets, his social standing and friends, even his children – Job cries out to the Lord saying, “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7.11).

His story proves that we are most susceptible to bitterness when our sense of justice is violated; when we are persecuted, seemingly without cause, or cast down without explanation; when a hope is deferred; a dream shattered; or an expectation which we considered legitimate is left unmet.

Job’s primary obstacle against discerning God’s good intent was that he was bound by time. He did not have perfect knowledge. He could not see beyond his present circumstances; could not, even faintly, anticipate what the outcome of his story would be. All he knew for certain was that he was in pain.

But because we have access to the end of Job’s tale we can see that his bitterness is based on an incomplete view of history. At the end of Job’s trials, God not only restores his position, but grants Job an impartation of Himself. In response Job rescinds his complaint: “Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (italics mine, Job 42.3).

In the face of my own pain, when I am overcome with bitterness that my friend, my husband, God Himself would allow X event to come into my life, I must remember that God does nothing by accident. He not only institutes the circumstances that come into my life,but He controls the outcome. “He knows our frame; and is mindful that we are but dust.” Perhaps most importantly, He is working to accomplish what concerns each of us; to complete the good work He began so that we can cling with confidence to the promise in 1 Peter 3: “After you have suffered for a little the God of all strength will himself perfect, confirm, strengthen and establish you.”

True Value: Defined

“Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” - Romans 12.2

We live in a godless society which values, above all, beauty, brains, talent, money, power, and man’s praise. Just look at television shows like American Idol or America’s Next Top Model. If you do not have the talent or beauty to compete favorably against your neighbor you get voted off, eliminated. In the world of the show, you cease to exist.

God tells us that in His kingdom, only three things will endure. These are: faith, hope, and love; the greatest of these being love. Just as money is the greatest commodity on earth, faith, hope, and love are the greatest, and I would venture to say the only, commodities of heaven.

From the world’s perspective, nothing is eternal. Life ends when the body does. The closest thing to achieving eternal life is living on in the minds of other men; this is why fame is so important, why people like Donald Trump spend their lives building empires to themselves. The Romans understood this which was why the worst fate that could befall any leader was to have his name “stricken from memory.”

In contrast, the Bible teaches that every person is born with an eternal soul; and that all souls will live on forever, whether in Heaven, united with God, or in Hell, separated from Him.

For this reason, it doesn’t matter how much talent, beauty, or brains you have. For as Paul’s epistle to the Romans reminds us: “[W]hat do you have that you did not receive and if you did receive it why do you boast as if you did not?”It matters not what you have, but what you do with what you have; it is not, ultimately, who you are that is important, but who you are becoming.

You may be thinking, What a silly, foolish concept. If this is true, then there is no way for a man to compare himself with another man. No way for a man to take ownership over his own, hard-earned achievements. It may be distasteful to the American way of thinking, but that is precisely the point! For “…God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise…And the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are. So that no man may boast before God” (italics mine).

God has ordered the universe in such a way so that all boasting must be toward Him; all praise must be oriented toward Him; whatever value you and I perceive in human existence is imputed by Him. So that everything that has breath praises the Lord.

By turning man’s value system upside down, God forces dependence on Him alone. In His infinite wisdom He has created a universe wherein a mother – someone who spends her days washing, nursing, clothing, cooking and playing – could be, in the next life, judge of a kingdom or queen of a realm. After all, Jesus was a carpenter. His disciples were fisherman. None came from kingly tribes but God called them great because they had faith in Him.

Throughout the Bible we are given ample evidence that here we are not citizens, but strangers. Our true citizenship is in heaven; and it is to heaven we must look when determining our values. When my husband’s grandfather sailed from Holland to America he spent his time reading about America, its laws and values, its great leaders and statesmen, the historical developments which made it what it then was; he even went so far as to memorize those features which stuck out to him as being quintessentially American.

Is this not a perfect metaphor for our lives on earth? We are on a voyage, sailing toward our true home. Thus while we are in between places we should spend our time transferring our citizenship, refining our hope, and actively seeking to transform our minds in conformity with His will.

Where Your Treasure Is

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. -- Matthew 6.19-20

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation.” In the nineteen fifties this belief lay at the foundation of society. No one questioned whether it was valuable for a mother to spend her time caring for the needs of her child. People understood that children needed more than basic care – they needed discipline, correction, and the attentive role-modeling that only a full-time parent can give.

So what happened?

A thorough answer to this question would fill a great many pages. I believe a central part of the answer has to do with the revolutions of the nineteen sixties. In particular, the women’s movement – and its culture of entitlement and self-actualization – bred a new generation of women who rejected the former way of thinking and embraced the lie that self-fulfillment and “having it all” are rights that no one, not even their children, should take away from them.

I once had dinner with a female surgeon and her eight-year-old son, Lucien. She got up from the table several times with calls from the hospital. After the second or third interruption Lucien let out a long sigh and said to me, “She cares more about her patients than she does about me.” I attempted to console him but quickly discovered I could not find the words. This was a woman who worked eighty hours a week while her son spent the majority of his time with a nanny or relatives. How could I argue with something that was so obviously true?

Do not misunderstand me: I am not saying there is anything wrong with being a surgeon or working eighty hours a week. These things only become morally wrong when they are pursued at the expense of others.

Though the phrase of Jim Elliot’s has become a little worn from use, it deftly articulates a concept well worth repeating: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” This philosophy is nowhere more applicable than in Christ-centered motherhood wherein a woman freely sacrifices her time, energy, and resources – she gives of her very soul – in order to prepare her child to live a fruitful life, both in this world and the next.

But she does not delight to put her child’s needs before her own because she is self-pitying or masochistic. Quite the contrary! The Christian mother is working for her own good as well as the good of her child; she understands that “without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he is and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Hebrews 11.6).

Mothers are living illustrations of the concept of biblical rewards. Just as Christ was able to endure the cross “for the joy set before Him,” the Christian mother is capable of putting a stake through her own will in order to, out of obedience to Christ, service the needs of her family.

Christianity says if you want to be great you must be a servant; that in order to be first you must make yourself last. We give, believing that we will one day receive back in spades all that we have ‘given up.’ In the process, if we seek God, we can enjoy the added benefit of finding our needs met fully in Him.