Healing from a Bitter Wound

When criticized, there are three elixirs you can pour over the wound.

1. You can pour the water of resentment over the wound but only after you consider John Roebling.  The man who was the mind behind the infamous Brooklyn Bridge was imagining the same structure that would span the Ohio River connecting Northern Kentucky to Cincinnati.  When dreaming of what could become, his foot was caught between a passing ferry and the dock.  After losing a couple of toes, water therapy (pouring water over a wound) was used in order to fend off gangrene.  He died of tetanus 10 days later.
2. You can also administer the witch hazel of revenge.  You may contend with your rage for a few rounds but even the stoutest of fighting men see through swollen staggering the inability to quench the fires if indignancy.  The drunken stupor will lighten the load in the evening but sorrows will be doubled by morning in a hangover of malcontent.
3. Finally, there is the costly frankincense of forgiveness.  Although one drop costs your firstborn, one drop will do.  Mark Twain equates “Forgiveness… [is a] fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”  After you peel yourself from the barbs of someone’s creative blow to your character, and you have considered the filet-o-flesh it took from your pride hide, break the vessel which contains the blood like copper smelling concoction over your new wound.  As the stench of your torn flesh hisses its last protest you will feel a new kind grow in its place.  This new skin glints with the glimmering spark of heaven.  It is a graph grown in the lab of Calvary’s grief and duly tended and administered by the Holy Spirit.

C.S. Lewis makes a point in “The Weight of Glory” about asking for forgiveness as opposed to asking to be excused.  The person we forgive who has a good and reliable excuse is “not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”  In the end, the monthly installments on your bitterness never end, and the bounty hunter of unprocessed grief always gets his man.

Choose wisely.