Keeping Watch With Those Who Are Bitter

Sunday, March 3, 2013 Lent, 2013 Reflection Series: #3 Keeping Watch With Those Who Are Bitter. Lenten Newsletter sent Sunday nights by midnight. Lettertowomen.blogspot.com .   Are there those around you who are bitter at heart, whose suffering is large? Do they sometimes take it out on you? Even blame you? Are you tired of their unending stories of being wronged? Sometimes we just want to tell them to stop being bitter. Rooting out bitterness is a work of God, a grace, a journey. Understanding and seeing past the ugliness that bitterness brings with it, is a work of grace. As Jesus walks to Calvary, he looks into the crowd of bystanders and he loves them even through His pain. He knows their troubled hearts, what is good there and what is bad, and yet His eyes hold only love for them and compassion. Can we take a second look at our loved ones and see their pain, and renew our desire to love them more like Christ. Can we watch one more hour with them? OH Happy Lent! Sharon Colossians 3: vs. 12-14 "Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience...Forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." A Story of a Bitter Man Who Found "A Way Out" From His Bitterness From the Injustice Done to Him. My friend, Jack, had worked his whole adult life in the steel mills. He regularly requested double shifts, so that he and Georgia would have enough money to travel when he retired. He wanted to show his wife the world. Soon before he retired, The steel company was bought out by another company, and part of the buy-out included a loss of most of his lifetime retirement savings/pension and hospitalization. How could someone just come in and take from him what was rightfully his? Oh, how POWERLESS he felt. Deep sorrow. Who could blame him for being bitter? There was a real wrong done to him and it impacted his whole life.Georgia told me that he would go down the basement and just cry. His soul was so weary and burdened. He was bitter because of this deep sorrow. Jack was just a few years older than me but he looked like a very old man. The mills and double shifts had taken a toll on him. Jack came down with cancer and died. But before he died, he bought his wife a double wide trailer and felt as though he had given her something special. Maybe not the vacations , but a home...something they owned. Before he died, Jack turned his bitterness around...He made a new "picture" and didn't let the abuse by a large company tear his heart out completely, even though at times he thought it would break in two. I was blessed to witness Jack's tears, to walk with him through some of his sorrow and to love his wife after he was gone. Maybe you can help someone you love, or even a stranger, paint a new picture to help them out of their bitterness.