The Challenge Of Choosing Between Bitter And Better

There may only be one letter between bitter and better, but like street signs on the same post, the two words point us in opposite directions. And these signposts are planted firmly, with the same two arrows, at every difficult junction we face on the road of life. No matter how well we may have chosen in the past, or how poorly, the same choice always presents itself all over again: will we let the difficulties of life make us better? Or bitter?

It’s obvious, isn’t it? One choice is literally named “better.” So that’s clearly the choice we’ll always make. Right? Why would we willingly choose to travel a bitter road when a better option is always available to us? The answer is this: we don’t always believe the signposts. 

Sometimes our lives become so difficult or our relationships get so messy that we think bitter is the better road. We become convinced that we are entitled to bitterness, that our sufferings have earned us a right to travel where others dare not tread. We may even feel that we must travel that road—that any other choice besides bitterness would minimise the magnitude of our sufferings or passively justify the injustice of our circumstances. In a position like this, the road marked “better” that moves us away from bitterness and towards forgiveness, contentment, perseverance, and hope can begin to look like a cruel joke, like an impossible fairy-tale path up a mountain of make-believe happiness. Better to face reality squarely and let it lead us down, down, always down into the bitter abyss. The mountain is a myth, anyway. Or is it? 

The hard part about picking between bitter and better is not the words. The hard part is believing them. The hard part is looking at a landscape of pain that sometimes stretches out as far as our eyes can see and still believing that this path that says “better” can actually, really, truly bring us to a better reality somewhere beyond the horizon of our sight.

At the end of the day, the choice we face at every difficult junction of life is not merely between bitter and better—it is even more fundamentally about faith. Do we really believe there is a better road than bitterness? Will we leave the burden of our suffering in God’s hands and trust that he is able to handle it without minimising our pain? Will we step forward and act on the secure hope that his promises are true, and his justice is greater (and more just) than our own? The better path may not be an easy one, but it is a trail blazed for us by Jesus, a Saviour who knows the way to the mountain of real, genuine joy. He travelled, like us, in the valley of pain and sorrow, and he planted his signposts to guide us home. Do we believe him?