When Life Throws a Curveball

 “Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” (Job 2:10, NLT). 

Sometimes you can see a curveball coming and swing. Other times the off-speed pitch comes when you were expecting a fastball, and you get caught looking. In all candor, I was planning to write this month’s newsletter on the topic of the Maternal Marriage. But then a big looping ball got thrown at me. Thing is, I was expecting it but not until the 7th inning. This curveball came in the 2nd inning, and it changed the dynamics of the inning I was in. The breaking ball came in the form a family member whose dementia took a dramatic turn downward. 

The day before I left town to help my family, I had two unexpected conversations. One was with an old friend, and he encouraged me to be transparent and write something rather than skip this month’s newsletter entirely. But what? Later that same day, I taught a class on forgiveness at a local church. Before I got up to teach, a gentleman came up to me and thanked me for a newsletter I had written years ago. I was both grateful and curious. When I returned home later and looked, I wrote that piece in 2017. 

I’m taking that man’s reference as another pitch. Therefore, what follows is a lightly edited version of that 2017 article I entitled, “Bitterness and Brokenness.” I pray it proves to be a hit for at least one reader. 

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When someone asks me where I grew up, I say I’m from a small farm town in central Iowa. The response I often get is, “Oh, where in Ohio?” Really? For the past forty-four years, I’ve lived in the Upstate of South Carolina where the clay is red like rust and hard as iron. In central Iowa, the soil is black as coal and soft as saw dust. The soil of my childhood easily turned over; the soil of my adulthood just… doesn’t… want… to… turn. 

Think of bitterness like red clay and brokenness like black soil. I’ve seen both kinds of ground when I survey the landscape of people’s lives. The differences are both subtle and significant. Here are some observations: 

• No one stumbles into either bitterness or brokenness. To experience either one requires a crisis, a trauma, or repeated series of events to begin with, followed by an extended period of time. No one would wish the crisis upon anyone else. The pain that goes on in a person’s life that begets either bitterness or brokenness is profound and life altering. 

• Because of the crisis and/or trauma, there is deep emotional anguish for both the bitter and the broken. Both can shed tears over what has happened. But the bitter weeps with worldly sorrow while the broken weeps with Godly sorrow. Only a very thin line separates the one from the other. 

• The broken feels how thin that line is, and that it wouldn’t take much to become bitter; the bitter feels that there is a great gulf to the other side and cannot imagine getting there. 

• Both the bitter and the broken have expectations—and the expectations can be legitimate. But the bitter cannot let go of his, while the broken regularly surrenders his. 

• One can remain bitter and still relent, bitterly; one can be broken and still hold his ground, brokenly. 

• The bitter person does not trust another; the broken person does not trust himself.

• Both bitterness and brokenness would have the flesh and blood of another: for the embittered, that of the offender; for the broken, that of Christ. 

• Both bitterness and brokenness involve a deep shift of personal identity. In bitterness, identity is shifted from personhood to shattered victimhood. The bitter person’s identity is centered on the offender or circumstance. The broken person’s identity is oriented to and rooted in Christ, and he gains a wounded but whole self. One is predicated on pride, the other on humility. 

• The bitter person refuses or is unable to forgive by losing touch with the details of why he first needs to be forgiven; the broken person fights to forgive by staying in touch with the details of his own need to be forgiven. 

• The embittered person self-inflicts the high price of injustice by replaying the tape in his mind. The broken person lives in the freedom of God’s forgiveness because he replays the tape, over and over, that Jesus pays the highest price of justice once and for all. 

• Just because you’ve been embittered or broken at one point in your life through one set of circumstances or relationships doesn’t mean it won’t happen again at another point in your life through a different set of circumstances or relationships. 

• Bitterness will not bend while also demanding justice (which never comes); brokenness bends to the challenging will of Christ and finds justice in His cross. One is forever grinding it out internally while the other practices contenting his soul and stilling his mind.

Because the content of your habituated self-talk makes all the difference.