Season 4 Episode 7: Bitterness
Alex Kocher (00:05.770)
Brenda, we're back with this season of wisdom from life's common struggles. And today we're gonna talk about bitterness, which is a really difficult topic. If we are in a place where we've been hurt, where we have had to experience the sin of another against us, we may be struggling with bitterness. And today, the way that we're gonna approach bitterness is almost in contrast to the way
talked about forgiveness in season two, and that is that forgiveness is letting go of an offense and our right, so to speak, to retaliate, and bitterness is the opposite of that. Bitterness is holding on to the offense and thus holding on to our right to retaliate against someone. And so one of the things that I think that we've recognized is that so many of these common struggles sit in an intersection of sin and suffering, and we see that with bitterness
Alex Kocher (01:06.030)
due to someone else's sin, and yet we have a strong temptation to sin in that we want to dwell on what's happened to us.
Brenda Payne (01:14.950)
Yeah. And I want to also say that it could be a perceived sin issue as well. Alex, sometimes we get bitter because of the perception. And I think that's where our podcast on anger will be so helpful even to examine that issue.
Alex Kocher (01:19.171)
Hmm.
Alex Kocher (01:28.730)
Yeah, yeah, that's good. So I think it was really interesting that we discovered that the root word for bitterness means to cut or to prick. And I had to really think about that. And what I, um, two thoughts on that to cut or to prick, I think one, when we let the offense of another person stay with us, it continues to cut and prick us. And it goes along with what we said about forgiveness, that we see the way that
Brenda Payne (01:53.654)
Yep.
Alex Kocher (01:58.730)
the knife, but in bitterness we actually continue to replay it over and over again. And then I think you also recognize that bitter people are prickly people who cut others. And so there's kind of a double meaning to that. Bitter people tend to be sarcastic. They tend to be mean-spirited and critical, judgmental, and it doesn't take long for us to recognize when a person is bitter unless that person is us.
Brenda Payne (02:11.862)
Yep.
Alex Kocher (02:28.791)
for us to see that.
Brenda Payne (02:31.371)
It is really true. I think bitterness tends to be very blinding at times. And we just need to recognize that the scripture warns strongly against bitterness. In Ephesians 4, 31, Paul says, let all, not some, not a little, but let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander, or clamder, if you want to. I like to put words together sometimes.
Alex Kocher (02:56.452)
Yeah, I just put it all together.
Brenda Payne (02:59.490)
It's my own little dictionary. Be put away from you along with all malice. And it really seems like Paul is giving us a progression of bitterness. And so I just wanna walk through these terms. So wrath comes as we rehearse the offense in our minds, right? Like our passions are stirred and the anger in us really begins to boil. And then we grow resentful of the person and start holding that grudge. So we kinda can go from an explosive anger
Brenda Payne (03:29.990)
that just continues to be there over time. And then we move to anger because we talked about, you know, in anger so often, one of the ways we respond is we begin to consider how the offender deserves to be punished for the wrong. Like we have this high sense of justice. And then clamoring is this idea is that we cry out to God. We question if he sees and hears the injustice, like, hey God, do you see what's going on? And our hearts begin to demand that something be done to punish the offender.
Alex Kocher (03:30.091)
Hmm.
Brenda Payne (03:58.990)
or for someone to come along and make things right. And then once all of that has begun to, you know, really, really, really marinate in our hearts, what's in our hearts begins to spill out of our mouths. And we begin to talk about the offense to others. And we can't normally talk about the offense without talking about the offender. And so there's almost a sense in which we need to tell others to validate our feelings
Alex Kocher (04:21.036)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (04:28.970)
right for our cause, like we want to bring other people into our way of thinking about the injury. And then kind of the final step is malice, because once our hearts are filled with all of this other, right, this ill will, we will seek ways to cause pain or injury or distress to the person who's hurt us. And that can come in a lot of different forms. It might be, you know, actually exploding or it could be maybe taking a step back.
back and isolating from them. But typically there's gonna be some sort of punishment that's gonna come.
Alex Kocher (05:04.050)
Yeah, I think it's true. I never thought about this idea of there being a progression to bitterness. I certainly see that there is a whole constellation or soup of bitterness here of the way that it plays out in our lives. But I do think it's interesting that God didn't leave us there even in Ephesians 4. Like he gives us the antidote. He tells us in the next verse, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God and Christ
Brenda Payne (05:15.751)
Yeah.
Alex Kocher (05:34.250)
forgave you. And so again we recognize that the opposite of bitterness is forgiveness. And I love this verse especially because it roots us in the Gospel first. It doesn't expect us to deal with our bitterness on our own, but it recognizes just what we said about forgiveness that we first have to orient to the fact that Jesus forgave us. And from that place we are able to move into forgiveness of other people where we don't
and a payment from them and where we are released somebody from the debt of the harm that they've given us.
Brenda Payne (06:13.810)
Yeah. And I think we have to really understand the impact of bitterness, how destructive of a force it is if we're gonna get serious about dealing with it. Because I think the illusion is that, you know, I'm not hurting anyone. You know, this is just me. But the bottom line is, is that bitterness really destroys both our body and our soul. It's like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die, right? I've heard that expression and it's so true. And research shows that bitterness can lead
Alex Kocher (06:38.734)
Yeah.
Brenda Payne (06:44.130)
like many of the areas we're talking about, things that affect us spiritually also have a tremendous impact on us physically as well. And I kind of think about bitterness is literally this idea of it'll eat you alive, both spiritually and physically. It'll kill you slowly, your spiritual life and your physical life as well. And so we want to talk about how we can move from bitterness to forgiveness. That's the question we wanna answer today. And you know,
Alex Kocher (06:44.450)
Hmm.
Brenda Payne (07:13.770)
it puts simply at times that we just need to quote, put off bitterness and then quote, put on forgiveness. Right? Yeah, because Ephesians four is kind of the put off, put on dynamic where we find all of those in Paul's writings. But we all know that's easier said than done. Can we really just choose to put off bitterness and then willy nilly choose to put on forgiveness? If you've ever really, really been injured
Alex Kocher (07:22.879)
Okay, there you go.
Brenda Payne (07:44.530)
tremendously in hard and hurtful ways, you know this is not easy. So how then do we do it? And we would like to today spend some time talking about overcoming bitterness through forgiveness by grieving how we've been sent against and grieving the hardness of our hearts to withhold forgiveness.
Alex Kocher (08:07.710)
So we're saying the path from bitterness to forgiveness goes through grief. And so the way that we're going to talk about this is we're going to use some material that was developed by Brad Handbrick. We've adapted it a little bit for our purposes. And first we're going to look at the similarities between grief and bitterness. And then we'll look at the differences between grief and bitterness. And we wanted to look specifically at the story of Naomi and Ruth.
Brenda Payne (08:12.770)
Correct.
Alex Kocher (08:37.650)
this being a story of someone I think definitely moving from bitterness into forgiveness. And so what we see in the book of Ruth is we see that we have a Jewish family and they have moved away from their homeland because there was a famine and they moved to Moab which was basically a heathen country. And all the men in Naomi's family die. Her husband and her two sons which leaves Naomi with
her two daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah. In a terrible situation with no way to support themselves and culturally this meant that they were all three destitute. So Naomi sees no way to provide or protect these women and tells them to just go back to your father's home and Ruth as her daughter-in-law ends up refusing and she wants to travel back to Naomi's homeland with her and so many of you are familiar with the story but if you're not you can read it in the
Alex Kocher (09:37.590)
but what you'll see is that the ending is not at all what we expect it to be. That God does some amazing things through Ruth and shows himself in just a beautiful way. But what I want to look at today are the similarities between Naomi's grief and bitterness. So we see first of all that grief and bitterness are both triggered by unpleasant personal events. So sure there were other people living in the land who were experiencing the
famine but Naomi personally is struggling not only with what's going on in the whole country but also with the loss of her family in her future. This is deeply personal what she's experiencing. And then
Brenda Payne (10:21.290)
Yeah, and I think that's, I think it's just a good point, Alex, that we are rarely bitter about things that are happening out there. There's a lot of injustice in the world. There are things that are far worse going on in the world and with other people than in my own life. But bitterness is going to be what actually impacts me.
Alex Kocher (10:28.013)
Right.
Alex Kocher (10:34.770)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (10:38.250)
Yeah, yeah. And then I think we also see with grief and with bitterness, both, both of them feel like they're natural. And what I mean by natural is like, they're, they're not something that we're doing, but it's something that's happening to us. So there's a, there's an element of powerlessness or a feeling of powerlessness and that I can't control what events are happening to me. And it's going to push me either into grief or bitterness.
Brenda Payne (11:07.271)
Well, both grief and bitterness involve a high degree of mental repetition. And I think we could just imagine Naomi on that hike, right, with each step home. She was thinking about everything that led to the death of her family. She would have been in tremendous emotional pain. She would have been grieving. She would have been crying. She would have been recounting all the losses. But at the same time, by the time she reaches her hometown, she tells her friends to call her Mara a Hebrew name that means bitter.
Alex Kocher (11:35.810)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think this is probably the hardest place when I talk to people where they question whether they are grieving or whether they're bitter because they know that they, um, that it keeps coming up in their mind. And so they ask the question, if it keeps coming up for me, have I truly forgiven? I think it's a great diagnostic question, but I do think we have to
Alex Kocher (12:05.650)
coming up is because it still hurts and we can still release and we can still mourn. If we can hold it with the grief and not with the desire for retaliation, we may hold it even for a lifetime, especially with big traumatic family, personal family events. We may hold some of that hurt for a lifetime and it might crop up, especially as it comes into other relationships. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to hurt.
Brenda Payne (12:08.095)
Right.
Brenda Payne (12:13.312)
Right.
Alex Kocher (12:35.690)
bitterness. It could be, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's bitterness.
Brenda Payne (12:37.012)
Right.
Brenda Payne (12:40.130)
Yeah, and I think our next two points really show where grief turns to bitterness, and that's how we interpret events and people and the influence it has on the way we think. So the next point is just both begin to shape the way we interpret the events and people around you. So, you know, she hears God has provided food in Judah and sets out with the girls. But somewhere along the way, she decides the girls are better off to go back to their own country,
land and marry than to go with her to God's country. So she begins to think about, interpret the events that they're better having temporal security than an internal inheritance. And later on in the story, she accuses God of being against her. So we can see now she is beginning to interpret her situation in a way that begins that little seed of bitterness that is beginning to grow in her heart. And then both grief and bitterness
Brenda Payne (13:40.150)
of the past and anticipate the future. And we don't know for sure, but if I was Naomi, I would probably be regretting the move to Moab. You know, I would be thinking maybe we should have trusted God and stayed in Jordan and we would all still be alive. Yeah, we would maybe be hungry, but we'd still be alive. And if you recall, they go back because they hear that God is actually providing food in their homeland. And also, if her sons
Alex Kocher (14:07.116)
right.
Brenda Payne (14:10.130)
not married pagan wives. She wouldn't have just herself to deal with. She wouldn't have these two women she was having to think about as well. She doesn't see any hope for the future. She even tells them, hey, I'm too old to have any children. And even if I did, by the time they grew up, you'd be old women. Wouldn't do you any good. And I think also she's thinking about, it's going to be hard for them to find a husband and Judah as foreigners. So I think with grief comes a lot of people
Alex Kocher (14:35.436)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (14:40.310)
of future worry and concern as well as with bitterness, but I think with bitterness we just lose hope and we forget to remember how God is going to intervene, that God is in the story, that He is writing the story and that we can trust Him in the story.
Alex Kocher (14:56.190)
Yeah. So we're talking about similarities between bitterness and grief, but we wanna look at the differences. And this could be almost diagnostic for how we check our own hearts of whether we're holding on to an offense in order to mourn the loss or in order to seek retaliation. And so Brenda, you've graciously agreed to let us use your story of a situation you went through over the summer,
Alex Kocher (15:26.150)
issue that's been going on for a long time where you've had to really recognize the differences between grief and bitterness. And so we're going to walk through some of these points and then let you describe how this played out in your own situation. So the first one is that it touches on where you just left off, that grief is an early stage of forgiveness, but bitterness doesn't have forgiveness as its goal. And so here we see like we...
Alex Kocher (15:56.150)
To me, bitterness isn't thinking of a way through, but grief is thinking of a way through. And we're going to mourn the loss in order to get to forgiveness.
Brenda Payne (16:08.870)
Yeah. Yeah, I think just in my situation, and of course, this was a longstanding issue in my family that really came to a head over the summer. And one of the things that I have to say is that along the way I had done some grieving, but I didn't realize how much bitterness was still in my heart until the situation came, and it really was kind of the hot water that drew out what was in my heart. And to tell you, it was a little shocking to me
Because, you know, I said, we said early on how bitterness can be very blinding and I really didn't realize how much bitterness was in my heart. But in my situation, when this situation came to me, I didn't want to forgive. I just didn't want to forgive. At that point, I was done with forgiveness. I wanted the offenders to pay for their wrong. And in my mind, they didn't deserve forgiveness. They had actually gone too far.
Alex Kocher (16:39.453)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (16:59.411)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (17:04.250)
Yeah, yeah. And, and so it kind of in conjunction with that, we see that grief allows us to process through the loss, but bitterness is just rehearsing the wrong over and over again. And it has that idea, like you said, of retribution.
Brenda Payne (17:26.610)
Yeah, I would ruminate over the offenses. It was literally like my mind was on a loop. It was play, rewind, repeat. Play, rewind, repeat. And my husband would say, you know, why are you letting these people live rent free in your mind? It was so true. They were just taking up so much real estate in my mind. But in some ways, it felt very powerless to get past it. I wanted to just kind of jump over. You know what I'm saying?
spiritual band-aid on it, figure out how I could just push past, not thinking about it. But you know how when you try not to think about something, you think about it more. And it just even becomes deeper and deeper and deeper. And that's what happens. I would just simply try not to think about it. I'm just not going to think about it today. But then it would just continue and, you know, in my mind. Yeah.
Alex Kocher (18:06.392)
Yeah, yeah.
Alex Kocher (18:19.010)
So let's see if this one fits Brenda. Grief sees a past, a present and a future, but bitterness knows no boundary of time. And it kind of touches on what you said you didn't see a way forward or you didn't see a future because bitterness doesn't look towards relief. And it keeps the hurt in the present.
Brenda Payne (18:44.410)
Yes, it really does feel like when you're bitter that you are reliving the hurt every single day. Like you wake up and you think, okay, today, maybe I'll be a little bit further down the road, but it's just so painful. And a lot of it does have to do with the way you begin to interpret and perceive the facts. But for me, some of my interpretations and perceptions were that the ending, every ending to every story I played in my mind with every person involved was only that.
Alex Kocher (18:50.671)
Yeah.
Alex Kocher (18:54.756)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (19:15.110)
It was only that. And I really saw no way out. I felt stuck. I wanted to die. I wanted someone to die, me or someone else. I mean, really, I was in that much pain. And if you've been in that much pain where you literally can feel it in your body, like in your heart, you really think the only way to get out from under this is either I have to die or people involved have to be gone because I just can't deal. I just was feeling like I couldn't deal with it the past, the present, and I certainly didn't
Alex Kocher (19:15.396)
Mm-hmm.
Brenda Payne (19:44.410)
want to talk about the future. Because the situation had major ramifications and implications for my future.
Alex Kocher (19:46.170)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it
Alex Kocher (19:51.190)
Right? And so you could only look at the future without hope. You could not see the hope that that could be there. And so I think the distinction we're making there is that grief allows for there to be hope for the future is that you know we we are not those who grieve without hope that we can acknowledge the loss in the present. We can even acknowledge that it might hurt in the future. But we we yeah but we but we do it knowing that we
Brenda Payne (20:14.490)
Yes, I think we have to.
Alex Kocher (20:21.150)
can't see the whole picture and that we know that God is still at work and so that's where our hope comes from. The next one is that grief replenishes strength but bitterness depletes strength. So this is speaking to what is happening to us physically with bitterness and I think if if any of our listeners or as we personally have struggled with bitterness we feel we
Brenda Payne (20:23.112)
That's right.
Brenda Payne (20:39.377)
Yeah.
Alex Kocher (20:51.750)
and that grieving, although in the moment I think grief does feel very exhausting, it's very tiring, but if we're moving through the process of processing of loss, we see over the the course of time that we are gaining strength and I think that's a good one. Another one of those good diagnostic questions like, okay, right now I do still feel exhaustion, I feel depleted, but but now that a week is
Brenda Payne (20:59.632)
Mm-hmm.
Alex Kocher (21:21.110)
gone by, two weeks have gone by, do I see that I am gaining strength as I process this loss or am I continuing to feel utterly defeated and depleted because I'm really holding so much anger?
Brenda Payne (21:36.270)
Yeah. Well, I know for me it was exhausting. Physically exhausting. I would just, you know, ball my eyes out at night. I found it was hard to fall asleep. You know, I would lay in bed and thoughts racing through my mind. I would wake up in the middle of the night, feel my heart racing. You know, I could feel it in my body, not just in my mind, but, you know, literally in my body. And throughout the day, because I wasn't sleeping and because there was a lot
Brenda Payne (22:06.990)
along with the bitterness and you know just it takes a lot of energy to hold that the bit the motion of bitterness that I would just have a hard time concentrating throughout the day and honestly I found that I didn't have as much energy for other relationships like other relationships relationships require energy and so if your strength is depleted then you just don't have it for those other relationships that are really important.
Brenda Payne (22:37.214)
And yeah, so it was just, it was really hard for me physically.
Alex Kocher (22:42.592)
Mm-hmm. The next one says that grief restores our focus and bitterness distorts our focus. And I think this is getting to the fact that bitterness causes us to continue to see everything through the lens of ourself and our hurt.
Brenda Payne (22:58.130)
Yeah, no doubt I would say yes, yes, yes, yes. Because it seemed like every topic just brought me back to the reality of my situation, right? And bitterness really does keep us self-focused. And it's kind of like we're just always licking our wounds. But it's not helping.
Alex Kocher (23:22.590)
Next says, grief honors relationship, but bitterness defiles relationship. I think this is a really good one, I think, to look at because we begin to view the relationship as one that's only going to bring us hurt, and we begin to view the person, like you said before, as only bad all the time, but that grieving allows us to honor that the other person,
of course, is a sinner. But they're also a sufferer. And if they're a believer, they're also a saint. And so we can see them in all of who they are and not just see them as the person who hurt me. And so we can honor that there is growth that can happen in the relationship because God is working in the relationship.
Brenda Payne (23:54.912)
Yeah.
Brenda Payne (24:14.490)
Yeah, bitterness doesn't allow for growth in other people. It really doesn't. All I could see was the people, you know, what was really negative in the people I was bitter toward. I just saw them one dimensionally. And there's no way that the relationships could ever be reconciled much less restored with this mindset, right? Like, basically, I've just cut off any future hope with them. And my views were also shared with others who were close to my situation.
Alex Kocher (24:17.431)
Mm-mm, mm-mm.
Brenda Payne (24:45.230)
And so that was also damaging because some of those people were struggling with their own bitterness and There's no doubt that the things I said my perceptions Influenced them in their own bitterness. And so I'm sad about that
Alex Kocher (24:58.412)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (25:03.310)
The last difference between grief and bitterness is that grief pleases God and bitterness displeases God. And I think this is really a statement of our positioning that in bitterness we kind of position ourselves. I know I do like with my back away from God because I have this sense that he's not going to be pleased with the way that I am holding vengeance in my own heart. But that with grief,
Alex Kocher (25:33.350)
the Lord and lament, I can turn towards the Lord and know that he wants to hear my crying out for justice. He wants to hear the pain, but I am turning towards him and leaving the vengeance part with him. I'm not taking it back. And so I have a sense that I can do that before him because he's pleased to know where my heart is, but he is calling me to leave it with him.
Brenda Payne (25:51.091)
Yeah.
Brenda Payne (26:01.730)
Yes, he is so patient and so kind and really what he just wants us to do is repent and turn to him because he knows we're hurting ourselves and hurting other people. And of course, you know, missing his glory in that. But, you know, I think when we're bitter at the time, you know, we feel justified in our bitterness and it really took the Holy Spirit continuing to convict me to call me to repentance. You know, he did that through his word. I had wonderful people like you and some other people in my life walking with me.
Brenda Payne (26:32.870)
who did a great job of allowing me to express my grief but also gently pointing me back to Jesus and yeah I just think that God was reminding me that vengeance belongs to him and it's his ultimate heart to restore people and relationships and really going back to Alex the Ephesians 4 32 that he was
inviting me to consider all I had been freely forgiven of. How he was not holding one thing against me. And yet here I was holding this not only against these people, but holding it against them as if it could never, ever be forgiven or rectified. And there was nothing but doom and gloom at the end. And it really wasn't until I repented that I felt relief.
Alex Kocher (27:27.430)
Yeah. So Brenda, what happened then when you turned from bitterness to grief?
Brenda Payne (27:34.990)
I remember sobbing on my bed and finally just breaking. Like there was a real collapsing, like literally like physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, I just really collapsed. And I laid down my sword of justice. I asked for the Lord's forgiveness and I told him I'd walk wherever he wanted me to and I trust him with my heart and outcomes. But I wanna talk about how I did that because again, there's a process I think that's really important
Alex Kocher (27:41.874)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (27:48.970)
Mmm.
Brenda Payne (28:04.970)
bitterness if we will be tempted to just use a spiritual bandaid and kind of just want to jump from bitterness to forgiveness but God wants to do major and radical heart surgery he wants to really uproot the bitterness and The the way that we do that is that we have to take our suffering to him I think so often we spend a lot of time in bitterness trying to figure out the wise the house and the what's of our pain But honestly explanations aren't very helpful when we're hurting
but expression is. Like we need to give expression to our pain, we need to have witnesses for our pain. And I think we need to remember that the normal rhythm of suffering as a Christian looks like the gospel, right? We experience pain, which is the cross. We grieve, which is the death part. And when we allow Jesus into that space, he brings new life, which is resurrection. So when we allow ourselves to grieve the losses, and we do that, Alex, by honestly and candidly expressing our pain, our angers,
Alex Kocher (28:46.476)
Yeah.
Alex Kocher (28:56.637)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (29:04.970)
fears to God and repent of our bitterness, then we can come to a place of surrender. I mean, I think that's really what it amounts to is getting to a place that we can surrender our hurt and trust in God's sovereignty, goodness, and wisdom over our suffering. And I'll, you know, you walked this journey out with me and I think for about six weeks it was really intense. And then it took about another six months.
Alex Kocher (29:17.891)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (29:23.437)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (29:30.594)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (29:35.090)
to really, really begin to see the Lord solidify this surrender in my heart because I kept kind of wanting to pick it back up. But the beautiful thing is God did a miracle in my heart. He took me from complete and utter bitterness to such softness and forgiveness and hope. And I've seen him work in ways I could never have imagined in the situation already.
Alex Kocher (29:57.455)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (30:05.070)
own heart, so much beauty in other relationships that have been hurt, where there was bitterness as well. And then with the offended parties, there's just been a lot of, I just think things to rejoice over now, things that we're seeing that I wouldn't have expected. And so the idea of lament, we want to put in our show notes, an article on lament, and a video that we did about how to write a lament.
Brenda Payne (30:34.970)
our online class, we do more on lament. And then I know that we want to hopefully have a season that's upcoming where we will approach the topic of lament more exhaustively. But I really think that as Christians, oftentimes, we just don't see how grief really plays into getting over bitterness. And I don't think I realized it until I was on the other side.
Alex Kocher (30:46.694)
Mm-hmm
Alex Kocher (31:00.270)
Mm-hmm.
Alex Kocher (31:04.695)
Yeah.
Brenda Payne (31:05.090)
and we started talking about how did you overcome your bitterness and get to forgiveness. Then I realized because I lamented, I took it to the Lord. I went deep, deep, deep into my pain. I invited Jesus deep, deep into those deep dark places of my pain and because wherever there is death and you invite Jesus in, he will bring life. He will bring life and he's done that again in so many ways. The other tool I want to recommend is using our
Alex Kocher (31:27.536)
Mm-hmm
Brenda Payne (31:34.970)
center suffer tool. We have a episode on that in season one that we can also post in the show notes. But as we've written some questions just on how to view ourselves and how to view the other person. And these are really helpful and particularly for ongoing bitterness. I feel like the lament is like when you're in the pit, you can't even really think through these rationally you're just having to sort through so much of your emotions and so much of just your pain.
Alex Kocher (31:52.950)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Brenda Payne (32:04.990)
Anger, fear, anxiety, all of that. But once you come out, there's going to be these little remnants that will continue on where bitterness will rear its ugly head. And you're going to have to wrestle it down. And so this little tool is great because we need to orient ourselves before the Lord, before who are we and who is the other person. And if we don't do this, we'll only see the bitter person as a sinner, and we'll only see ourselves as sufferers. And we need to have a better view of both.
Alex Kocher (32:24.150)
All right.
Alex Kocher (32:31.092)
Right.
Alex Kocher (32:34.930)
Yeah, one thing I want to say to clarify, because I taught this recently, is that somebody asked me, well, what do we do if the person is not a believer? I think it's a great question, like, how do we then view them? And I think it's just one easy little tweak. We choose to see them as a sinner, as a sufferer, and we choose to see them as an image bearer. They may not be a saint yet, but we choose to see them as an image bearer and want to treat them with the dignity
Brenda Payne (32:59.454)
Yeah.
Alex Kocher (33:04.890)
and honor that any image bearer is due. And so I'm gonna even tweak our worksheet there to note that. I don't think it's, I don't think that's a hard stretch for any of us to understand, but I think it was a great question. And again, I like what you're saying, Brenda, that the lament is the vehicle that took you from bitterness to forgiveness, and that the Saints in our sufferer tool is something that kind of
you in that place of always seeing the whole person, of always understanding you as a whole person before the Lord and the other person as a whole person before the Lord and that that kind of is a checkup so to speak that you use when you may feel yourself sliding back into that place. So with each episode we've also tried to give not just a sole tool but to also give a body tool and the body
Brenda Payne (33:36.290)
Yes.
Brenda Payne (33:38.877)
Yeah.
Brenda Payne (33:44.314)
Yep.
Brenda Payne (33:51.034)
Yeah.
Alex Kocher (34:04.890)
today may be one that most people aren't comfortable with. I know I'm not. I just have to be honest. This is just not something that I do well. But lament is such a intentional form of grieving that we also wanted to mention that just in our bodies we need an intentional place to grieve and that means crying it out. And so we we actually have an article called the Eight Benefits of Crying and
Alex Kocher (34:35.370)
and having some spaces that we set aside to allow ourselves to cry. The article talks about the fact that research has shown that in addition to being self soothing and shedding, in addition to being self soothing, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins. And these chemicals make us feel good. So crying literally can help reduce our pain and make us feel better. It's like what we say we need a good cry.
And so it's just really acknowledging that when I talk to people about grief, I talk about that there's a space for spontaneous grief, that it hits us and we allow ourselves to have tears. But there's also a space for intentionality in our grief that we set aside time to sit with the feelings of pain and loss. And maybe what we need to do is just set that timer and give ourselves a space to either journal it or listen to a song and to
Brenda Payne (35:05.015)
Mm-hmm.
Alex Kocher (35:34.870)
to cry and that becomes just a physical release for our body. So I hope that's helpful, not just for our souls, but for our bodies. And I want to say, I think that this discussion of bitterness has really rounded out our forgiveness series for me. So I just want to mention again that our forgiveness series in season two goes through the Rs of forgiveness. And it is really challenging.
challenged me. But taking it one step further today and understanding the difference between grief and forgiveness, understanding that grief is the vehicle, is the means by which we get to forgiveness, has really helped me to understand that there is actually a process through which we can move out of our bitterness and into forgiveness. And so I think they're great companions. If you haven't heard our season on forgiveness, I encourage you to go back and listen to it. And I hope that if you have heard
it today may answer some lingering questions you have of have I really forgiven. So thank you Brenda for allowing us to walk through your story and I hope that this will be an encouragement for all of us to continue to grieve and to move through that to forgiveness.