Resolving Resentment

As humans, we must learn to navigate the difficulties of a split mind.

I believe we can experience only two emotions: love and fear. They may come clothed in a myriad of different ways, but it all comes down to love and fear, and if you pay attention to your body, you’ll know the difference.

Fear makes you tense, your pulse quickens, a tightening in the chest may occur, and there’s often a feeling of shutting down or darkness. Love opens. There’s a lightness, a feeling of joy, of hope; love makes us feel whole, healed. Fear is of the ego. Love is of God, or our true selves, and therein lies the split and where the healing work is to be done.

When speaking or writing of God, everyone experiences the concept in a different way. Since my experience will be perhaps vastly different from yours, please bear with me in the language I use for my experience.

God is love, and the more God you can bring into your life, the less fear there will be. Eventually you will wake up to the knowledge that truly through God, or love, you can do all things.

It’s easy to write that. The reality is much, much harder, but will be the most important work you will ever do. In the past I’ve written about resentment in a few forms; a friend may have snubbed me, or a server may not have brought me exactly what I ordered in a restaurant. The incidents go on and on because I allow them to. I’m now giving this up to God for healing. If I resent anyone, it means I perceive a difference between me and him or her, and to perceive a difference means that I don’t see them as my brother or sister in God.

Let me give an example. Back when Damien and I were promoting our book Yours for Eternity, we were invited to appear on a live nighttime talk show. We had gone on that very show several times before. The host was always a gentleman to us and had a real interest in justice, the death penalty, and the state of our legal system. He had since left the show, but we agreed to go on, thinking the producers would follow in the same manner as before.

Upon arriving in the green room, we learned very quickly what we were in for. On the screen, the preview for our interview was a montage of serial killers and the women who had married them, with screams playing in the background. The host was rude, mean, and tried his best to humiliate Damien and me. I couldn’t find my voice and faltered in the immediacy of the attack. The interview was a failure, and the host was gleeful that he had taken us down.

For a long time I obsessed over this man. I fantasized about all the things I wished I’d said to him. I wished for his career to end. I wanted him to be bullied as he had bullied us.

It was only recently that I realized the longer I held onto my bitterness toward him, the more I tied myself to him. I had connected myself to him with a tie stronger than steel.

The only way I know to cancel out that kind of resentment is to cast it on the Christ within me, the light within me. And to accomplish this, every time I think of that day and that man, I turn it to love. I’ll start for a moment, reminded of old wounds, but then I quickly move away into feeling love for him—genuine love, for if I hate him, I hate myself. We are all connected by the only thing that never changes—God.

This is an in-the-moment practice that must be done over and over. It’s difficult, but in time you’ll see the hate, bitterness, and fear will slowly dissolve, and the results are nothing short of freedom.