Have you ever found yourself at a place in life in which you were at a high risk of becoming bitter? For several years, I taught a junior high girls’ Sunday school class. One point that I always tried to make to them was, “It is not a matter of IF you’ll get hurt but WHEN you’ll get hurt and WHAT you’ll do with that hurt.”
Let us look at Ecclesiastes 3. Verse 1 says, To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: Verse 11 says, He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. Verse 17 says, I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.
These verses have helped me to fight in those weak moments when bitterness could have taken root. I had to acknowledge repeatedly that the time I was hurting was just “a time.” When I step back now and look at the whole picture, I can see that those hard, unfair, and even awful moments were just a small part of life as a whole.
To put it in a time frame, if six months of my thirty-nine years of life (Ouch! Am I that old?) were filled with troubles and trials, about 1.28% of my lifetime would be spent on hard times.
Though I failed frequently in the early years, I have tried very hard to adopt the “potato” mindset, instead of the alternative “egg” mentality, when dealing with tough moments in life. Some classic examples of these mindsets are found in the book of Job: Job was a potato, and Job’s wife was an egg. Both experienced the same “boiling water” of circumstances that God allowed in their lives, but their outlooks could not have been more different! You see, the same boiling water that softens a hard potato will completely harden a soft egg.
No one would ever say that losing ten children, their home, their livelihood, and their “status” among the community would not take a toll on them. However, the Bible records two vastly different uses of words from Job and his wife during this time. Job prayed for his friends. Job’s wife told her husband to give up—to curse God and die. Although she tends to get a bad reputation because of her statement, if we were to look at Mrs. Job’s situation with a little grace, we may find that she just did not know what to do with her emotions and, perhaps, wanted her husband’s suffering to end. Whatever the case may be, one thing is for sure: She became a hard-boiled egg.
Job, however, managed to deal with his judgmental friends and his hardened wife, on top of all the heartache, and come out on the mashed potato side of things. (I much prefer mashed potatoes to boiled eggs—sorry to my keto friends!) The boiling water of suffering did not make him bitter; instead, it softened his heart toward God.
Galatians 5:16 says: This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh. My flesh may want to be hardened by my circumstances, but a daily choice of laying down that fleshly urge and choosing to walk in the Spirit helps me allow life’s trials to soften me instead. When battered by the hardness of life, let us choose the potato journey.
by Tracy Lankford
