Who Does Resentment Really Hurt?

I was eating dinner Thursday evening and watching a taped Oprah Show with my wife. Actress Susan St. James was Oprah's guest that day. She, her husband and their boys shared their family's experience of dealing with the death of another son in a plane crash. Her husband explained that his wife, Susan, had "shut the door" on bitterness over their son's death. She did not want to go there, and would not let the family go there. She explained that she had long believed that 'being resentful is like taking poison, then hoping the other person dies.' That is one of the best descriptions of what resentment and bitterness does to us that I have ever heard. Resentment focuses on the person or situation over which we are resentful or bitter. But we are the person who is really being hurt. Resentment is a self-inflicted wound. Most of us, of course, do not decide we are going to be resentful. We find oursleves being resentful. It creeps up on us. But knowing we may be the actual victim of the poison we are trying to give someone else, is a motivator to ask God to help us unload it. Grace and peace.