Going Deeper

Bitter

Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you (Ephesians 4:31-32)

Bitterness ruins us....

‘Bitterness imprisons life, love releases it. Bitterness paralyses life, love empowers it. Bitterness sours life, love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes’ (Henry Emerson Fosdick)

The desire for vengeance can certainly drive and dominate our lives. That is clear from the swashbuckling story The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Set in early nineteenth century France, the book tells the tragic story of Dantes, a man who was wrongly imprisoned and tortured. Betrayed by his enemy Fernand, who went on to woo and marry Dantes' fiancée Mercedes, Dantes spends his every moment dreaming of freedom – and vengeance.  As soon as he miraculously escapes and returns to the world with riches beyond measure, he sees it as a sign that God has opened for him the door of revenge. 

But an obsession with revenge changes us beyond recognition: Dantes is not the same man who entered prison fourteen years earlier.  Instead of the innocent, carefree, life-loving boy of nineteen, Dantes is now a hardened and mistrustful man in his mid-thirties.  He is no longer the clean-cut hero, and now, not only does he have a new name – the Count of Monte Cristo – but a calloused heart.  The passion for revenge has ruined him for good.

In Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary on the Holocaust, a leader of a Warsaw ghetto uprising speaks of the bitterness that remains in his soul over how he and his people were treated by the Nazis.  'If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.'

The first person to gain from forgiveness is the person who does the forgiving and the first person injured by the refusal to forgive is the person who was wronged in the first place' 

Is it time to realise the effect that bitterness is having upon us?

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