Anger, Bitterness and Hate

Anger is a surface emotion.  It's like when you fall down and scrape your knee.  It's our first and immediate reaction to a situation that hurts us or is wrong or that hurts someone else that we love. Like a scrape, if you don't clean it out and let it heal, it will become infected and fester.   I am angry when someone hurts my kids.  The mama bear in me has been known to want to punch someone lights out, but I would seldom react that way.  I feel anger when someone hurts me.  I have been hurt over and over again in the last 8 months and I admit it, I am angry.  I think anger can be compounded when the person that does the hurting doesn't take responsibility for that hurt.  They blame that hurt all on you.  Eventually, you either believe their lies or that anger turns into something bitterness.

Bitterness is a disbelief in the fact that the anger will ever end or that the person who hurt you will ever understand how much they've truly hurt you.  Bitterness has a tendency to fester in your soul.  It's like a sharp thorn that keeps pricking you and drawing blood.  No matter what you do or how you move, that bitterness keeps resurfacing and poking at your soul.  You try to get away from the bitterness by distracting yourself and doing other things.  Some people do things that are unhealthy, like they might drink, do drugs or find another way to numb the pain.  You simply want to the pain to go away, so you are willing to do anything other than removing that thorn to get the pain to stop.  Eventually, your pain becomes constant and where that thorn has punctured your skin,  you start to build scar tissue.  That scar tissue turns into hate.

Hate is one of the strongest emotions that you can have, but it's also the most difficult to get rid of.  It's like a thick layer of scar tissue on your soul.  You start to feel nothing but negative feelings toward the person that hurt you.  No matter what they do, positive or negative, you feel nothing other than hatred or numbness and it is such and intense negative feeling that when others try to talk with you in love and in truth about the situation, you no longer can see the logic in it.

The Bible strongly warns about these feelings and how we should deal with them.  Forgiveness is the key to combatting these feelings.  The Bible says that we need to forgive 70 times 7 times when someone wrongs you.  I never understood this before, but I do now.  I have been wronged over and over again and that person doesn't understand that he's done wrong.  He feels that I should forgive and forget and we should pick our lives up like nothing ever happened, but that's just not possible.  Without trust, it's hard to have a loving relationship.

What I can do, is to love him and pray for him and hope that the Lord will completely change his life.  I can already see some changes, but I also still see things that make me wonder where his heart truly lies.  All I know is that I can't hold on to these feelings of anger, bitterness and hate anymore.  I don't like what it does to my soul.  I need to have love, joy, peace, faithfulness, kindess, compassion and self control in my heart.  This way, my life can be fulfilled not matter what else is done to me.  I know that God is in control and will honor my walk with Him.