We live in interesting times. There are many different value systems that you could be living by, and many of them are vehemently incompatible with each other. The incompatibilities between these value systems reflect themselves in the polarization of sociopolitical conversations. As an example, it is very difficult for a value system that promotes gender-affirmative care to co-exist with a value system that sees it as genital mutilation.

One way to understand this broader clash is as a conflict between what I call resentment culture and grace culture.

In resentment culture, a crucial aspect of your life is to not forgive and move on, but to hold on to the slights you’ve encountered—to collect them across many different humans you’ve met.

Back when I was caught up in resentment culture, if someone had described it to me, I would’ve quickly concluded that I wasn’t in that culture. Because a crucial ally to the mechanism that collects resentment within you is Denial. The part within you that holds on to resentment is so blatantly dis-ease-ridden that it needs to ally itself with Denial so that you don’t notice how much disease it’s causing in your life.

Because if you saw that—if you saw how much suffering it causes—you would let it go. The main lie that the Resentment Collector tells you is that you won’t be able to handle the breaking of your heart. But it’s actually not your heart that breaks. It’s the hardened protective layer around your heart that breaks. And then, perhaps for the very first time, you can actually feel your heart.

Until you’ve felt how soft and wonderful your heart really is, you’ll keep running away from “heartbreak”, because you’re confusing the protective layer around your heart, for your heart itself.

That protective layer is made up of bricks of resentment.

The part of you that’s fallen for the lies of resentment culture—the Resentment Collector—goes around collecting these bricks. Each represents a resentment toward someone you’ve crossed paths with, strengthening the protective wall around your heart to prevent you from experiencing “heartbreak”. But what it calls heartbreak is actually the breaking of that wall so you can experience your own heart.

Your heart is this soft, tender muscle that carries so much life in it. The softness of the heart helps you connect to the softness of other people’s hearts. Through that softened connection, we experience togetherness.

The moments that the Resentment Collector turns into bricks are actually moments of sorrow—moments of sadness for the separation we experience from each other.

The opposite of resentment culture is what I call grace culture.

In grace culture, you recognize that every human you’re relating to, working with, or dealing with has a certain capacity to keep their heart open and soft before their past wounds close it—and before their inability to see those past wounds causes them to start building up their own wall of resentment.

Every human has a certain capacity to keep their heart open, including you. And because you’ve noticed that within yourself and given yourself full permission to be with your past pains, you can stop making it about the present connection. You understand that while the present connection contributes to it, the heart carries a deeper sorrow—because the heart is connected to the oneness of all human beings.

If your heart is soft and open, how could it not tap you into the collective field of sorrow and suffering?

And yet, when you practice staying with that, you notice how lovely it actually feels to be in a soft-hearted space.

If I were to describe it to a past version of me—one who was so caught up in lust—it feels like the first blush of romance. Like spotting someone new for the very first time, feeling attraction, having these fantasies of a life together. That’s the level of softness that one feels in the first blush of romance—that’s how soft the heart feels without the resentment wall around it.

And you have a choice to actually experience that delightful state of your heart if you just cut off the deal you’ve made with the Resentment Collector inside you. To do that, you also have to cut off your relationship with the forces of Denial, because resentment and denial go hand in hand.

You see this when someone aggressively closes out a friendship or relationship—it’s like they’re slamming the door hard on their way out. If you had access to grace, you’d move gracefully out of a relationship, thanking the other person for the lessons that connection brought, even if it was painful or messy. You’d thank them and then gently close the door.

You always have that choice when you close a door. Gently closed doors stay firmly closed. Slammed doors bounce open again, needing to be slammed again and again.

Folks caught up in resentment culture love the crashing sound of the door as it slams into the door frame, leaving small marks that disease over time. What they are truly seeking is the crashing sound of the resentment wall around their own heart being brought down. Until they can make that happen within themselves, they go around creating circumstances that let them experience that crashing sound through others.

The resentment wall around your heart truly is the source of a lot of disease—in your body and in your mind. You may not see it now, because along with your deal with the Resentment Collector, you’ve struck a deal with Denial. One of the jobs of Denial is to make sure you don’t see how your deal with Resentment is poisoning you, bringing you closer to death.

Denial does that job very well.

You can track Denial in your system if you tune in. Denial has a reactive energy—it comes very quickly, without breath. When someone is entangled with their own Denial, it’s almost impossible for them to hold other possibilities. Because if they did, all the lies that the Resentment Collector tells them would start to unravel.

The biggest lie is the one about “heartbreak”: the Resentment Collector tells you that you couldn’t handle “heartbreak”, but it’s a lie. What’s actually breaking is the resentment wall around your heart. Through what Resentment calls “heartbreak”, you actually (finally!) feel your heart—oh how soft, how tender, how wonderful, how alive it is to be in that space!

If you ever saw that fully, all the lies that Resentment and Denial have told you would come crashing down. You wouldn’t need to slam doors anymore. You’d be able to explore connection with someone—whether friendship or romance—with curiosity about where they’re at in their healing journey.

You’d become clearer about what truly brings you nourishment, which is simply any connection that furthers the softening of your heart.

When two humans connect in a soft-hearted space, they’re connected to infinitude—pure oneness.

Many unfortunate men live under the falsehood that this can only be obtained when they are having sex. It’s quite unfortunate—firstly,

because it’s just not true. You can experience the delights of intimacy without even touching anyone. You can experience the softness of your own heart and God’s love for you through that softness, all on your own.

And it’s unfortunate for another reason: there’s much greater potential that sex can hold for a man, but he’s disconnected from that potential if he lives under the falsehood that intimacy only exists in sex.

There’s a deep incompatibility between resentment culture and grace culture. One of them subsumes the other.

I don’t need to mention which one does.

Grace will win out over time because grace can hold resentment—resentment can’t hold grace. Grace is built on truth; resentment is built on lies.

That’s the simplest, most practical framing of the spiritual war being fought in our world, and within every human—the war between good and evil.

And what complicates it further is that you could be verbally on the side of God, the side of good, and yet your actions reveal that you’re a slave to Resentment and Denial. Or you could be openly denying God, and yet your life reveals that you’re flooded with His grace.

It seems to me that when someone is expressly in denial of God, what they’re often denying isn’t God Himself but a mistaken idea of Him—an image of God they were taught to reject. So even as they claim to deny God, their life may still be touched by His grace, because what they’re truly denying isn’t the living presence of God but a false conception of Him. There are humans who live agnostically, who don’t speak about God or use that word comfortably, yet their lives quietly reveal His favor. They’ve been shaped by cultures still infused with grace, unaware of where that grace truly comes from.

So let this be my prayer for us.

(A prayer is just an acknowledgment that God is with us every moment. In every conversation. And a turning towards him to bring Him in and ask Him for His grace so that we can together experience the nourishment of soft-hearted connection.)

Any lies the Resentment within you is telling you, and the Denial within you is preventing you from seeing—I ask our Father, who is present here in this moment as you read these words, to reveal those lies fully to you.
So that you may consciously choose your path moving forward.

And I pray to our Father that He holds you and comforts you through what you might think of as “heartbreak”,
So that you can experience the utter delight of the softness of your own heart,
And be convicted to let go of behaviors that keep rebuilding the wall around it.

In the mighty name of Jesus Christ, Amen.