Tuesday Tantrum

When justice is served and everyone gets their due, will we then all be satisfied? Then may we expect that peace shall reign evermore in our hearts? Neither self-reconciliation nor reconciliation with the other is enough, but faith working through love reconciling with truth. 

Justice is never simply about others getting what’s coming to them, paying for what they did. It’s about us as well. Sometimes our desire to see others pay for what they have done to us and those whom we love can turn into a breeding ground for the seed of bitterness to take root. It’s painful. This is unjust. 

An enduring characteristic of human beings is that we are affected by what people say and perhaps even more by what people don’t say. What’s it going to take for us to replenish our investment in our relationships? Social capital is cultural capital is economic gain is justice for all. A harsh word here, an irritated look there, microagressions self-justified every so often? It all adds up.

The fruit of bitterness is unpleasant to taste. It’s also hard to erase. It often begins to show up in fleeting thoughts towards others or even ourselves. We push back at those who may genuinely love and care for us. But this is just the beginning.

When reconciliation is merely outward or mererly inward, it’s like cool-aid to the tongue—a temporary effect, nice and sweet at first but gone shortly after, you get the picture. The point is that the taste of bitterness returns at the least expected moment. And this changes everything else we experience.

This is unjust—that we allow ourselves the temporary balm of peace at the cost of bitterness eating us up on the inside as cancer to our bones, our very structure, and to our organs, the systems that make up our individual and communal being as humans—justice thwarted, like “water off a duck’s back.”