Any Root of Bitterness

Last Saturday night I was up until 11pm stirring a new peanut butter jar. It was a particularly difficult one to stir, and it took me a while, and I found I was dealing with a little bit of self-pity. It was not the part where I was having to use remarkable effort to churn the (natural, non-hydrogenated and therefore non-homegenized) PB for my husband—my husband, who does more sweet, kind and helpful little acts of service for me in a week than most men do for their wives in a month. It was the part where I was the last one awake in the house.

The last one awake, and also the first in line to get up again in just a very few short hours, since no one else can nurse the baby.

So there I was, all alone, with not even my "morale committee" around to show me how much he appreciated the fact that I was staying up late to do this for him so that he could have his favorite breakfast in the morning. In fact, the morale committee had brought me my water and then crawled into bed while I finished nursing the Pea, not having really heard me a few minutes earlier when I told him my water bottle was overdue to be washed. He almost certainly had not meant to leave me all alone, but a prone position in a dark room had worked its magic, and he was now sound asleep.

All alone? I heard the question. No, I was not all alone. We had just recently had a little fun with the 5 Love Languages test, and almost everyone in the house scored highest on Quality Time. (I guess that's why I wanted my husband with me while I stayed up late in the kitchen.) If quality time was so important to me, then why was I balking at giving a few minutes of it to my heavenly Husband? What was wrong with a few quiet minutes spent alone in His presence, a little silent conversation?

The first thing I said to Him was that I had a little problem with self-pity that refused to go away.

That Sunday morning I got up with Ellie at 6:30, leaving my husband to sleep. It's what I always do, and then sometimes I go back to bed later when she does. It was the right thing to do, and I did not begrudge him the rest. I was also grateful for the night, in which I only had to get up once. And yet, I found myself feeling tired and discouraged, not least because Damian and the boys were going to church, leaving me behind with the baby, since she is still not yet in a place where we can spend a large chunk of the morning away from home. This should have been a restful idea: nap when the baby naps, etc. But actually, it often works out that she is fussy when I am home alone with her on a Sunday, and so self-pity was playing off of my fears of what the morning might bring.

Before Damian could get out of the house with the boys, I ended up absolutely screaming at Liam. I had told him that their socks were "on the ottoman." I actually did not mean the big ottoman in front of the couch, I meant one of the small ottomans (ottomen?), of which there are three in a row against the living room wall. While Liam was remarking very loudly that he did not see any socks on the ottoman, Parker cheerfully announced, "Here they are!" To which Liam, in a derogatory whine, replied, "But those are the ottomans, and you said ottoman, so how was I supposed to know...?"

I let him have it. It's a wonder I did not wake up the fragilely sleeping baby upstairs. I had quite a few choice things to say to him about how tired I was that my seven-year-old is always correcting me, and how if he were not so busy finding all the ways in which the people around him are imperfect, he could simply have used his brain to translate my mistake into the correct location of the socks. His wailed reply was, "But I'm a Beaver, that's just the way I am!!!"

Oh, I rose to that occasion. We didn't mean to arm this little pack-rat of facts and factoids with the implications of the four personality types, but it happened, and now we have to clean up after it. I have told him many times that it is fine for him to be a Beaver-Lion, there's nothing wrong with it, but he's going to have to recognize that there are some things that don't come naturally to either Lions or Beavers which he is going to have to learn in order to get through life. So my response to him this morning? "Yes, you're a Beaver, and there's nothing wrong with being a Beaver; but if you say, 'That's just who I am...' and let yourself be limited by your personality type, you will miss the whole point of what Jesus died to give you!!"

Does it strike you that perhaps those words are way too far above a seven-year-old's head for him to take in? And that, maybe, even though he won't be able to ingest their meaning, he will pick up on the weight attached to them? And also that it's probably too great a weight for a seven-year-old to bear?

You see, my seven-year-old is intellectually incredibly advanced for his age—it is not parental pride, but a certain wary objectivity, that makes me say he's at borderline genius levels—but emotionally, he can't keep up. (I think this finally really hit me last night when we had the Monopoly fiasco that I was writing about on my other blog.) My mom had the same premature brilliance, and she lived to tell about the disadvantages of being treated according to her IQ, while emotional development lags behind.

So Liam is constantly and unwittingly trapping me into trying to reason with him the way you would with a much older person, when what he really needs is for me to recognize that he's only a little kid. No matter how well he wields the mental rapier, he is too little to bear the weight of armor needed for a real duel. Therefore, I am the one who needs to be emotionally objective and hold him to a much lower standard than he appears, superficially, to be capable of.

And you know what the real problem is? That thing that prevents me from the sort of compassionately detached parenting that Liam needs? It's the same thing that keeps me from singing over the peanut butter jar: a little root of bitterness.

"Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: Looking diligently... lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled." —He. 12:14,15

There it is: what prevents me from peace with Liam is bitterness. I get irritated with him for being such a snobby little know-it-all. I even take what he says personally and allow my feelings to get hurt. And I am downright miffed that I should have to deal with such disrespect, not to mention the way the constant whinging and fighting with each other grates on me, when my children are supposed to be softhearted and obedient. But the real problem is me. Why should my joy be so dependent on whether or not other people are being sweet and kind?

I am depressed by the fact that my word doesn't mean a whole lot to these boys. I'm annoyed that I have to tell Parker several times to do (or not do) something before he decides he wants to comply. And I just let him get away with it, because until I know how to deal with it consistently and successfully, I don't want to die on that hill. I am sick of Liam arguing (or negotiating) with me over almost everything that comes out of my mouth. I am oppressed by the way that most of what I hear around me is spoken in an urgent, screaming tone, like those boys are two emergency sirens, continually setting each other off. And I am tired (literally, so very literally!) of the fact that my baby is not sleeping the way I can see for myself that she should be—needs to be.

Translation: I am dissatisfied with the lot my Lord has chosen for me, most especially because I have to deal with the imperfections of my family. (My husband has none, by the way. Ten years of marriage to me has apparently refined him to absolute purity.) Does God get impatient with my imperfections? No. So why am I allowed the luxury of irritation over theirs? I just recently pointed out to someone that if we wait until a person is lovable to start loving them, we are not showing forth the love of Jesus, who died for us when we were yet sinners. Psalm 16 tells me that my lot is good, and the lines are drawn in pleasant places. I know this by faith, whether I happen to feel like it's true at the moment or not, so I have absolutely no right to complain—by word, tone, look or gesture. Anything other than joyful praise starts to look suspiciously like there might be a little root of bitterness growing in my soil.

"...and thereby many be defiled." Could it be that the bitterness in my own heart fans the flames of arguing, fighting, back-talk and discontent in my children? What would silence those blaring sirens? Would Liam grow into a happy, flourishing plant (and Lael into a rock-strong, polished jewel) if I could let them be, stop trying to mold them into the right shape, give up my need to see the right things going on around me, and simply show God's irresistible, undeserving love to them?  Peter would agree: he tells me that fervent love would cover a multitude of sins. 

What Liam needs more than anything is to be shown the love of God until it melts his heart into softness at the wonder of it. I cannot convict him, anyway; only the Spirit of God can show him (gently, and as he can bear it) what an awful little prig he can be. Lectures and sermons never did anything but drive a sinner as far away as he can run; it is the joy of God visibly manifest in someone's heart that draws a person to say, "Where can I get that?!"

To indulge in self-pity when I'm serving little whiners is rather silly when one considers how patiently Jesus looks past my whining to offer me all God's riches. His joy, the joy of the One whose very nature is to live for another, is my strength. Let me just pull up that root of discontent and bitterness, and there will be nothing to prevent me from taking in the love of my Father and scattering it around me like precious dewdrops falling from my feet wherever I go.