I was making a salad for my guests, but found the radishes were bad. My grandmother always called it being 'pithy.' The memory was like a time capsule hidden in my salad fixings. I was a little girl when she broke a radish one day and then showed me the inside. It had a bit of an empty center, with a fuzzy, hard, sort of off smelling stuff around its edges. "It will taste bitter," she said with her matter of fact tone. She tossed it into the coffee can she kept in her giant farm sink. That can had all kinds of toss away stuff in it. Egg shells and coffee grounds dusted other garden friendly refuse. I knew at the end of the week that can would be dumped on the compost pile to rot for garden fertilizer. Grandma sighed and grabbed another radish. Then she said something I never forgot. "Penni, a bitter root is never a good thing. In vegetables and in people. Bitter simply ruins everything around it."
Fifty years later, I looked at the radishes there, now tossed in my own refuse can, useless. I had taken the time to pick all those vegetables for the salad. The other things were sweet and ripe, flavorful and appetizing. The radishes looked normal on the outside but the inside were ugly. If left in the salad its taste would likely overpower and make the whole salad bad.
It's the same with people.
Well, except for one thing. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Bitter people may look just fine on the outside. They are often quite lovely, with niceties and appropriate manners. They might even have a seemingly kind disposition. However, those who are bitter are quite deceiving.
All one has to do is take a look on the inside and the bitter, pithy, smelly parts will show.
How, you ask, do we get a look on the inside?
Most often its by accident. Say something that reminds of a past offense that has never been forgotten, or more importantly, forgiven. Sometimes it is simply being in a space or looking with a certain type of facial expression. Maybe a question is asked that sparks a hatred for some past person who, with different motives, asked the same.
You see, bitterness is not reasonable. It is hard and fuzzy and a bit smelly. Mostly it is angry that something happened, or did not happen, that it is believed should have happened or not happened. The unmet expectation rots the roots of a heart.
I looked out my kitchen window and thought of my beloved one. Bitterness had eaten up the heart so severely that a whole life had been turned upside down. Unmet expectations and anger, at perceived rights violations, had hardened the mind and the resulting life choices made landed a life headed for happiness in it's own refuse can.
I prayed for release. I prayed for circumstances to change. I prayed for help. Mostly I prayed for the ability to forgive and let go. Some hold on to perceived rights with the grip of an eagle's talon. We hold vehemently to what we think we deserve, and woe to the one who violates us without making it right by our own standard. We are hurt, then angry, and then, BAM! Bitterness digs in and begins to hollow out a hole in us. we may not even know we have lost our sweetness and become pithy. Or maybe bitter people don't care. Either way, bitterness ruins us, and all that is around us. It justifies meanness and choices based on revenge, wrath, malice and the like. In the end, bitterness kills the vessel it hollows out.
Just like those radishes.
But there is that one thing that is different. . .
A bitter radish is always bitter. A bitter human can become sweet.
Forgiveness. It is the stuff miracles are made of. Letting go of an offense. Allowing a failure to find grace. Giving mercy instead of hatred. Giving understanding that refuses to force someone to pay over and over for a past they cannot change. Allowing someone the gift of love in the place of judgment. Taking a deep breath and setting aside what hurts and embracing a new opportunity. Determining that hate is not worth the effort and releasing responsibility to make someone pay for their failure. Loving anyway, in spite of, without condition, for the good of another. Setting one's own mind free by setting another free. Trying again. Rebuilding. Restoring.
Now before you all start commenting that I am a codependent who is inviting abuse, STOP.
I am not saying all relationships are restored by forgiveness. Some are, and that is a beautiful miracle for which I refuse to apologize. When relationships come back together in forgiveness, wonderful wonderful things happen.
This must be understood for forgiveness to work its miracles: forgiveness has nothing to do with the offending party. It has to do with the forgiver and his heart. To forgive is to let go of making someone pay for what they did to you--paying thorough believing they are enduring your hatred; or malice; or absence; or revenge; or gossip; or any other emotion or action born of being offended. It is to let God have that hurt and take His vengeance in such a way that it is effective. Wouldn't that be awesome? That the person who hurt you gets what will work to make him sorry? God knows what to do to get to that offender. We don't. Our own devices do nothing. Well, they do make us pithy.
God can handle it. When we let it go, he picks it up. He will make it right.
A heart devoid of all that bitterness has room for something sweeter. When he takes out the bitterness, God will fill you with peace and joy and hope for the future.
I know this for certain. He did it for me. He will do it for you too.
Come. I will take you to him.
Comments