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I had the pleasure of making a trip down to my home away from home. I made my way down to Arkansas. I was attending the wedding of some very dear friends of mine. It's absolutely fantastic to see friends get married.

Arkansas is a second home for me. I am very much saddened that I'm no longer around so many close friends. However, Arkansas also has very unpleasant things associated with it as well. I went to college there for four years, and, to be quite honest and straight up, it sucked. Don't get me wrong: I value the amazing friendships that I made as well as the wonderful relationships that I forged with some of my professors. However, there are those few people who I really don't like because they… well… ruined my life.

I'll summarise it for you: I'm bitter. How bitter? Let's just say that I had to edit out more than a few paragraphs here that went into depth explaining everything.¹ Just today, I got a survey in the e-mail asking me for my opinion on changing the name of the university. Under what category describes my relation with the university, I took the opportunity to clarify our relationship in a profanity-laced sentence that utilised no uncertain terms.

Anyway, to get back to the point, while I was at this wedding, I ran into a large amount of people who I knew very well while I lived in Arkansas. In particular was Pearl.² Pearl works at the university. She is a most absolute awesome person. I would always have to cross her path whenever I needed official tasks approved or so. Sometimes, I would assign myself the jobs that dealt with her just because it would take me through there.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have a habit of not wasting time. True to my character, I didn't waste any time after the wedding ceremony in getting to the reception. The problem was that when I got there, I was so early that there wasn't a single soul that I knew. I decided to take a nice little walk through the town before I returned to the reception. Pearl asked me why I was headed the wrong way. She pretty much kidnapped me and invited me to sit at her table. I ended up sitting with half of my coworkers from M-DAT as well which was an additional pleasant pleasure. As the night went on, we somehow got on the topic of JBU. I don't recall how we got on the topic, but I took advantage of the moment by spouting out my displeasure of the university. She could sense the bitterness, so she shared with me one of her experiences with bitterness. At that moment, we were just two people with a common problem.

I carry dollar coins around with me. Working in Downtown Denver, I find that they work well for handing out to the beggers and the homeless who inhabit the streets. I happened to have a few of these dollar coins with me. Pearl asked me to pray for her in her struggles with bitterness, and she said that she would pray for mine. I immediately took out two of the dollar coins that I had. I gave one to her, and I kept the other one. It serves as a token — a rosary of sorts — simply a mnemonic device. Right now, it sits on my desk at work. Every time that I see it, I remember to ask the Lord for his guidance in Pearl's situation. However, I'm also reminded of the plank in my own eye, and I ask the Lord for guidance in my own life. Somehow, I can't help but think that that might have been Pearl's idea in the first place.

Bitterness is great: it's a feeling that I've grown to love throughout my life. Once I've had just a small taste of it, all that I want is more. I cannot tell you how many times in my life that I've laid awake in bed pondering my spitefulness and gaining a perverse pleasure from it. Still — and this is possibly the greatest beauty that I have yet to discover — every time that hate gets set aside and the void gets replaced with love, there is experienced a much better feeling than bitterness could ever dream of holding a candle to — whether that came about through a whole bottle of Jack Daniel's or just a simple moment of unaided pure clarity.

True forgiveness will breed life, beauty and love. All that bitterness will breed is more bitterness.

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1. That might be an exaggeration. At the very least, I was thinking about writing more than a few paragraphs.
2. I've changed her name for the sake of this post.