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.