Bitter

I've always had a love hate relationship with my name. Mostly love, but there were moments I wondered why my parents had named me after someone in the Bible who had such an extremely bad run for a good chunk of her life.

Lately, it's started to make a little more sense.

In the Bible, Naomi and her husband and two sons left Israel during a particularly bad famine and moved next door to Moab. Hard enough being an immigrant family, I'm sure, but then her husband and two sons died, leaving her alone in the world with her two daughters-in-law. It was at this point that she decided to return to her homeland. One daughter-in-law stays in Moab and one comes with her.

I'm guessing it would have been quite a humbling experience to return to her country with far less than she had left with.

Sometimes people approach these things with a 'que será, será' mindset, but she changed her name from Naomi to Marah to reassign her place in the world from 'pleasant' to 'bitter'. So, quite a bad run for her. Not seeing any sort of silver lining.

Probably, well, quite bitter.

Marah is not just a name she's picked out of thin air. Earlier in the Bible in Exodus, the Israelites had just crossed the Red Sea after escaping Egypt, and they're in the desert looking for water to survive when they finally come across some. Yay! But it's bad for drinking, quite bitter. Nay. They call it Marah meaning ‘bitter’.

If you've read any of the book of Exodus, you'll probably guess what happened next. The Israelites started to complain and grumble to Moses. I mean, we're three days in and there's grumbling. It's gonna be a loooooong 40 years.

Moses goes to God, who tells him to throw a tree in the water, and the bitter water turns sweet, so that ended well.

Biblical Naomi also ended up ok. Her remaining daughter-in-law, Ruth, ends up marrying a nice, rich family man who clears their debt, sets up their family name again, and gives Naomi grandchildren. All's well that ends well.

But that season in the bitter can feel so long. It's two paragraphs or a couple of chapters in the Bible, but it's literal years of heartache and heartbreak in Naomi's life. It's the actual experience of finding water when you're dying of thirst and then realising the water is undrinkable. Who would lead us out of slavery into a desert to die of thirst? What a miserable existence.

How do we hold these seasons of hard without complaining or renaming ourselves?

Well, I haven't been able to, and I'm not even facing half of what Naomi had to face. I'm not even facing half of what some of you are facing.

I've definitely complained a lot, and while I haven't renamed myself, I definitely had to muck in and really wrench at the root of bitterness slowly but surely planting itself within my heart.

It's a sneaky little sucker.

You start the whole 'hurting' process in quite a good state, trying to forgive and move on, and say things like "forgive and forget" and "I'm fine". But as it goes on, small things stick, and then bigger things stick, and then there's a whole massive thorny bush inside your heart that stabs a little every time you see a photo or have a flashback.

It's really frustrating because when you finally notice you have it nestled in there, you no longer have any high ground to stand on as you point your finger at the one who has hurt you. While pointing out the nasty wee thicket they've housed, you've managed to grow your own stabbing shrubbery.

It's quite humbling to look at that square on. We started that whole scene with a valid point to make, feeling righteous in our assessment, but in holding our pointing finger out, we have become fallen ourselves, albeit in our own way.

“No one ever wants to be the bitter old lady. The bitter old lady didn't even want to be the bitter old lady.”

This is where most people tend to check out a little, and western culture is currently affirming this, saying things like "You're allowed to feel hurt. You're allowed to put up protective barriers and create space." True. But that's half the story at best. At some point you have to put your pointing finger down and move on, let go, give it to someone capable of holding all the anger and frustration.

It's hard, but do you know what's worse?

Letting that spiky little hedge of bitterness continue its growth.

No one ever wants to be the bitter old lady. The bitter old lady didn't even want to be the bitter old lady. I'm betting my missionary salary that she probably got hurt a few times and didn't want to deal with the spiky little scrub growing in her heart and so now here she is, bitter and grouchy.

Let me warn you, facing the bitterness and dealing with it is much more preferable to the long-term effects of keeping your grudge. I would know, I've done both in my short but experienced life.

Yeah, it's painful to extricate the thorny little thicket, but it's painful in the same way that removing a wart is painful, or removing cancer from the body, in a good way. It needs removing or the outcome will be worse later on.

My name makes a lot more sense now, because her story was beautiful in a very normal way. She had a hard life, faced a lot of loss, and God still redeemed it in the end. In fact, she ultimately became the great-grandmother of King David.

I'm named after the ordinary woman that lost a lot, kept moving forward, and continued on to live under the redemption of God. I can see that now and finally I'm proud to bear her name.