What’s Healthy About Resentment? Plenty!

FRUSTRATION mounts over an insignificant issue, but this insignificant issue is predictive of a deeper problem – one that won’t go away. That just makes the frustration all the more pensive, and, we really have to know, what is nested in the frustration is resentment. Helplessness propagates the resistance of resentment. If all we can do for ourselves is resist by resentment we will choose such a thing, even if it’s buried deep in our unconscious thinking processes.

So, what’s healthy about resentment?

This idea, the title of this article, could easily be framed as a trick question – and I would suggest it is. Resentment may we be used as God’s goading that would propel us beyond hurt into a suitable resolution. And, if we agree that the frustration as it stands cannot be easily resolved, we need to allow God’s Spirit to do a work in us.

This is where the works of our imaginations come right to the fore.

The Works of the Imagination

Resentment is always inherently about a narrow, even fixated, focus.

Suddenly, we are dogged by an undercurrent of thoughts – that surround the items of our frustration – and we truly begin to unconsciously itemize them. Our imaginations are negatively set, because our imaginations are merely following the lead of a master whose name is Resentment. And Resentment is a horrible master.

The way we seize control is to take the imagination into submission, pointing it in the direction of what can be done, how the situation might be accepted, and to help us see the bigger picture more readily and convincingly.

When we consider how the imagination may be utilized by either party – Resentment or Forgiveness – then we are empowered mindfully to employ it for forgiveness and, therefore, healing.

There is a great deal of advantage in harnessing the imagination. God has given us a big, big world with which to get lost in our imaginations – there are so many ways we can divert the thinking into areas of growth, expansion, and blessing. Can you begin to see how the imagination can facilitate a blossoming out of the current frustrated and resentment-bound situations?

The power in resentment is this: it forces us to search for a better way.

***

Resentment is the unhealthy activator for change, if we will seek for something better for ourselves. In such ways, resentment can be considered God’s invitation into healing – a better state of mind and heart. See how resentment can be used by God? When we are sick and tired we desire change and we are motivated to change. The imagination is key...

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.