Bitterness Became the Furniture and Nobody Noticed It Arrive

Nobody would describe him as a bitter man and he would be genuinely surprised by the word.

He is not brooding. He does not bring it up. He has not mentioned the person in question in about two years and could go another five without doing so.

What there is, is an adjustment. There is a route he does not take. There is a name that produces about a quarter of a second of something before he moves on. There is a category of good news about a certain family that he receives correctly and does not enjoy.

None of that is dramatic and none of it is visible and he has never once identified it as anything, because it does not feel like a feeling. It feels like a fact about the world.

That is what bitterness becomes if it is left long enough. It stops being an emotion and becomes furniture: something in the room so long that a person stops seeing it and would only notice it if it were moved.

Paul writes a list about exactly this, and the order of the list is doing something.

The list runs from loud to quiet

Here is the verse, and the sequence is worth reading in order.

Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice. (Ephesians 4:31, King James Version)

Wrath. Anger. Clamor. Evil speaking. Those are all audible. They happen in rooms and other people know about them, and a person doing them is aware they are doing them.

And what does he put first? Bitterness. The quietest one, the one that makes no sound, the one nobody can see and the one the person carrying it cannot always find.

That ordering is not accidental. He leads with the item that is hardest to detect and easiest to keep, and it is the one that produces all the others if it is left, which is presumably why it is at the front.

You are able to have named first the thing that makes no sound. Ephesians 4:31 puts bitterness at the head of a list of much louder faults, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, including what has stopped registering as anything.

Grieve is a relationship word

And the verse immediately before the list is the one that tells you what is actually at stake.

And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4:30)

Grieve. That is not the word for angering somebody or provoking them or breaking a rule. It is the word for causing sorrow to a person who loves you.

You cannot grieve a stranger. Grief of that kind requires an existing relationship and a real attachment; it is the word for what happens in somebody who is close to you when they watch you doing something.

So Paul places, in the middle of a list of behaviors, a sentence about how a Person feels. And whereby ye are sealed is in the same breath: the relationship is not in danger, and that is exactly why grief rather than threat is the right word.

You are sealed by the One who is described as being grieved rather than threatening. Ephesians 4:30 uses grieve and sealed in one sentence, and it is the holy Spirit of God named in that verse who is both the one grieved and the seal.

And then one instruction that replaces six

After six things to put away comes one thing to do, and it is short.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. (Ephesians 4:32)

Be ye kind. That is the whole replacement, and it is smaller than the list it replaces, which is deliberate. He does not require a large interior event; he requires a manner.

Tenderhearted is the interesting one. The word is about the seat of the emotions being soft rather than set, and it is the exact opposite of furniture. Furniture is fixed and a tender heart is not.

And the standard on the end, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you, puts the whole thing downstream of something already done rather than upstream of something owed.

You are asked for a manner rather than for a large interior event. Ephesians 4:32 replaces the six-item list with be ye kind and tenderhearted, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, whose fruit is gentleness rather than a state a person works up.

How you find furniture

Practically, the difficulty with a thing that has stopped registering is that it cannot be looked for directly. Nobody finds their own furniture by scanning the room; they find it by moving something.

So the tests are behavioral rather than emotional, and they are small.

Is there a route not taken. Is there a name that produces a quarter of a second. Is there good news about somebody received correctly and not enjoyed. Is there a person who is never mentioned, and how long has that been true.

None of those is an accusation and each one is answerable in about four seconds, and a person who answers all four honestly usually finds one item they had not been counting.

And there is the psalm that is the right prayer for this, because it does not require the person to have found anything.

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. (Psalm 51:10)

Create. Not repair. It is the verb used in Genesis 1 for making something out of nothing, which is a strange word to use about a heart a person already has, and it is the right one for something that has become fixed.

You are able to ask for something created rather than having to locate it first. Psalm 51:10 uses the Genesis verb about a heart, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named two verses later, Psalm 51:11, in the same prayer.

Kindness is available before the feeling is

The last thing, and it is the reason the physical action on this page is what it is.

Be ye kind is an instruction about behavior, and behavior does not require a prior emotional change. A person can say one kind true sentence about somebody while the furniture is still exactly where it is, and the sentence is not a lie, because it is required to be true as well as kind.

That is what makes it usable this week. Nobody has to feel differently first. And in my experience, and in what I have watched in other people, the order tends to run the other way round from what everybody expects: the sentence comes first and the feeling moves later, slowly, and nobody can say when.

Nothing here asks anybody to say it to the person, or to raise anything with somebody it is not safe to raise it with, or to do any of this by a particular date. If what happened is still happening, or if it has got to the place where you do not want to be here, say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour.

You are able to be kind before anything inside you has moved. Ephesians 4:32 gives it as an instruction about manner rather than about feeling, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 5:5, that the love underneath it is shed abroad rather than summoned.