In those first few weeks after escaping our moldy home I began to feel feelings of anger, bitterness, resentment and even hatred.  Don't get me wrong, being human we all have these feelings creep in ever so often.  But this was completely different. 

The weeks following us abandoning everything, all the pictures, all the mold tests and all the attempts to reach out to the landlord to "fix this" seemed to be purposely ignored.  At this point I didn't know how mold could affect my reaction to being purposely hurt and abandoned by others. 

Throughout the years I realized that the mold industry was ugly and in fact, extremely demonic in many ways.  From what feels like calculated assaults of financial destruction, landlords, insurance companies, remediators, colleagues in the mold industry and even friends and family, I couldn't escape these feelings that somehow I was justified in my abuse and hurt.

Today, as I sit here preparing food in my kitchen, I had these thoughts come flooding back through my head due to several people in the past few months that have purposely and also not purposely tried to hurt me or hurt our family in some of the ways I have mentioned above.  As I began slicing and dicing and food prepping, my breathing became shallow, I felt sick all over and just stood there asking myself "Why do I feel like this?".

It wasn't but 15 minutes later that another Christian had reached out to me to ask me some questions about someone that had actually hurt me in the past.  It was as if God knew exactly how to answer my questions about why I was feeling so bad and why I am struggling with these feelings of bitterness over and over since our mold tragedy in 2010.

See, God uses others to bring us back to Him.  Halfway through my conversation with this friend I realized this wasn't about "that person that hurt me", it wasn't even about "this Christian friend who felt the reason to reach out to me today", but it was in fact God.  He just works this way.  Immediately there was a lightbulb in my head shining brighter than ever saying: "Jennifer, put away all bitterness and wrath and anger".  And that was it....yes..that was IT!  Got knew I'd do the rest and go back to my Bible and find the rest of what I needed to search out to know what my reaction NEEDS TO BE MOVING FORWARD to people who maliciously say terrible things about me, my family, my business, my decisions or physically harm me financially, legally or otherwise. 

Ephesians 4:31 -

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

First, I realized that Bitterness brings a curse to our bodies.  When we don't properly respond to others who hurt us we don't hurt THEM, we hurt OURSELVES.   It's like a mental or emotional state of mind that eats away at our bodies.  It literally acts like a poison to our bones.

I also realized that bitterness isn't a natural long term process...it's literally a WILLFUL ACTION done by ourselves to hold on to angry feelings, always being ready to take offense to everything or making ourselves vulnerable to the lack of respect of others.  If we don't let go of the WILLFUL ACTION part, we become a person easily able to break out in anger, malice, judgement or worse: do something in revenge.

I really felt God speaking to me through this fellow Christian who told me in response to me asking how I should handle a certain hurtful situation.  His reponse was the inspiration for this post today.  He said:

"I would simply make basic generalizations that don't point fingers at any one person but lend education on how to ......{do things differently}"

not the exact last words but they were omitted for subject privacy.

This really convicted me to be better, to do better and to act better in the future when people are pointing right at me.   How have you been wronged during this process and what positive measures have you put in place to react better and do better?  leave your comments below