02.03.10
Covered Up
In the Southern United States, there is a vine called the kudzu vine. It wasn’t native to the area but it became the “vine that ate the South”. It’s a good illustration of how unforgivenness can take over our lives. The similarity lies in that it shouldn’t be native to our souls. When you let the kudzu vine run rampant, it grows into and upon everything until everything else is choked out by it’s invasive nature. Unforgiveness is like that. Unforgiveness changes a person. It sets a seed inside someone that grows into a root of bitterness and resentment. Eventually when we hold onto past hurts through unforgiveness, it grows upon us until everything else is choked out. Recently I read about someone who was struggling with unforgiveness with someone close to her. “I have a heart full of bitterness and ice. I can’t bring myself to trust … even though I need to.” she says. She then goes on to talk about how she had vowed never to let the person in again. She talks about how she had built up walls around herself. She knew she wanted to be this person’s friend again but because of her unforgiveness she was always “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” So she could never give this person the chance to reconcile with her even though the person desperately wanted to and in her heart she wanted to as well.
Where is unforgiveness invading into your life? Unforgiveness is also like a wound that festers with gangrene. If something is not done to clean out the wound and let it heal properly, it will poison the body and threaten the life of the person. In the case of unforgiveness, it poisons all of our relationships just like gangrene does to the body and can cause us to destroy those things that sustain us. Many times, we just have to let things go and “clean out the emotional wounds” in our hearts before is kills our heart, the very source of our life. Going back to our original illustration, the only way to deal with unforgivenness is to clear away the vines and dig out the very roots so it doesn’t grow back.
