When outward strength is broken, faith rests on the promises. In the midst of sorrow, faith draws the sting out of every trouble and takes out the bitterness from every affliction.
~Robert Cecil (1563-1612)
I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of His wrath; He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me He turns His hand again and again the whole day long. He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; He has broken my bones; He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; He has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, He shuts out my prayer; He has blocked my ways with blocks of stones; He has made my paths crooked. He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; He turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; He has made me desolate; He bent His bow and set me as a target for His arrow. He drove into my kidneys the arrows of His quiver; I have become the laughingstock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; He has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.” Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in Him.”
~ from Lamentations 3
Oh beloved, it is true. Each of us, if we have turned to Him, will go through dark portions on the path He has set before us. And on the way Home to the Light – there can be some moments of terror. But the terror is not about things outside of us that will cause us harm.
The terror we feel is about us.
While we know for sure that we are new creations in Him. There remains a corpse that wants to scream its way out of the grave and reassert its control over the mind. And there are times where the mind (in its aptitude for craziness) thinks it wants to listen.
And in the moments where we begin to listen to the old man we were, there enters a dryness and bitterness to our existence. It is a distinct discomfort that we never really noticed before we knew Him. For perhaps, we had come to believe that dryness and anxiety were all there really was for us to experience anyway.
And in many of these moments, we dive into the bitterness and make even more a mess of things. And as we do, we suck enough of it down into our new spiritual lungs that we begin to wretch and cough at the horridity of who we can still be. We thought, at first, that we were embarking on some right course of action. But we find ourselves WAY off course from where we wanted to go.
We give in to despair.
We begin to think anger is a good option.
We fret over politics.
We wonder whether prayer is worth our time.
We fondle the root of bitterness budding in our soul.
We begin to look for comfort elsewhere.
But none of this helps. For even if we give ourselves over in the fight to something other than Him. We only end up with more bitterness and dross and loss and vanity and wind. And in the failing to walk in the Power of His Spirit we even give ourselves over to the illusion that maybe G_d is not even there with us any more.
And this is all very good news.
What?
Yeah.
Can we see it? We do not sense this bitterness because G_d is far away from us. Nor do we sense it because we have failed. We sense it because a very good and exceedingly Loving Being will do and allow and incite anything to convince us that we are unable to do anything of value in our own strength. Said simply, He is battling against that part of us which cannot inhabit eternity. It has to die. Our own foolish thinking has to die. It is as useless as taking a grand piano on a backpacking trip in the mountains.
Further, it seems this same G_d uses the bitterness in our soul as a sort of repellent for the baser instincts of the flesh. And while we surely can give ourselves over to its lusts, there is an effective and very loud warning system (if we will listen) calling us to again simply yield to His joyful and strength-giving presence – instead of pursuing the worn path of failure in our lives.
So, are you feeling the bitterness in your life? Good. Tonight is your night beloved. Instead of giving in to the flesh, recall the same steadfast Love that the prophet Jeremiah did. His Love is real, and it is the only place Hope exists.
