Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast. This is Real Talk Kim and I am so thankful that you chose to take some time to listen to me today. I pray that this podcast bless you today. We're going to be talking about how to open up.

You can overcome bitterness, how to overcome bitterness. Man bitterness will stick to sneak right up on you and just all of a sudden have you jaded and angry and resentful and unforgiving is just going to wreak havoc in your life.

You miss out on blessings by trying to teach people lessons. All of a sudden you're caught up in that whirlwind of pain, hurt, bitterness, resentment. So we're not going to let you do that.

I'm going to talk to you today and I'm going to give you some steps to walk in your healing walk away from the hurt and the pain. But I just want to let you know that you can go to realtalkkim.com. Be a part of my world. You can subscribe over there to my newsletters. I encourage you daily. You can be a part of my travel itinerary and find out where I'm going to be and come and see me so I can hug the life out of you. What are actually love you back to life. Go on. Go on. Or you can go download my free app which is Real Talk Kim. Go.

I'm all over social media as Real Talk Kim. So be a part of my world. I have a Tuesday morning prayer call 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. All of this is free. I just love to pour into you. So today let's get into it. We're going to talk about overcoming bitterness. No one wants to be better. It sneaks up on us.

Bitterness is unforgiving fermented. It is literally that sounds gross but it is bitterness is unforgiveness fermented. The more we hold on to pass hurts the more we become drunk on our pain and the experience can rob us of the joy we can find in anything.

Bitterness occurs when we feel someone has taken something from us that we are powerless to get back. We hold on to the hurt in an attempt to remind ourselves and others of the injustice we've experienced in the hopes that someone will save us and restore what we've lost.

Unfortunately bitterness only makes our sense of the injustice grow. It does nothing to heal the wound caused by the injustice. In fact it causes the wound to become infected with anger.

Bitterness is what I like to call wrath's little sister. Bitterness is wrath's little sister where anger can be just and moral if it propels us to seek solutions for the wrongs we have experienced or witnessed.

Wrath is a deadly sin because it becomes anger that feeds on itself and adds to wreckage, adds to wreckage caused by the original wound.

Bitterness does this too but instead of burning down the house with everything we value still inside bitterness is quieter, slowly poisoning our life until we lose it one joy at a time.

Here are some things you can do to begin to overcome bitterness.

Number one, you gotta forgive. I know how hard this is and I remember and I'm just y'all know I'm always real talk Kevin so vulnerable with y'all and honest with you.

But forgiveness is so hard and you know we'll preach all the time. I'll preach it my sermons forgive forgive and I always have to talk about you know in 2006 when I was walking through my divorce.

I talk about how God spoke to me one day and he said Kimberly you gotta forgive or I can never bless you and I can never move you from this place and I laid their thought I already forgave like I didn't feel like I had forgiveness, I didn't know what else to do but just lay hands on myself and I laid hands on my heart and I just said God I want to forgive but I don't know how.

You know the one thing that I discovered in that whole healing process of learning how to walk and forgiveness was a lot of times unforgiveness is like soul cancer and it takes us and breaks us apart it gives us all kinds of diseases, lupus, fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, breast cancer all of that stems from unforgiveness.

Forgiveness does not mean pretending everything is okay. It doesn't mean forgetting the hurt either. According to St. Augustine forgiveness is simply the act of surrendering our desire for revenge.

That is our desire to hurt someone for hurting us. Forgiveness is the gift we give ourselves that enables us to stop picking out the scab and start making a plan for healing.

You know I remember in that season when God was talking to me about forgiveness and he was like you're going to miss out on a blessing trying to teach somebody a lesson I was like ow, I almost got, I really probably did get a little bitter Betty towards God because I was like man I'm not the one.

He hurt me and I was like how do I need to forgive anyway and I remember all of a sudden just realizing every night I was praying kill him kill him with the train.

I was praying every night for my ex just to be dead because I was so angry and if you're not careful you'll see them moving on and living their best life and here you are over here in torture, hurting and you're angry because they're moving forward.

I wasn't just praying for him to die either man I was praying for a train to hit him you know what I was saying. I wanted him to die with a train because I knew if that train hit him he was going to be like splat.

...