When, like Ivan in Tolstoy’s story, evil befalls us and we suffer unjustly, it is more helpful to ask “what” than “why.”

We do not have the eternal perspective of God to accurately answer the question of “why” evil befalls us and causes us to suffer. But we can answer the question of “what.”

What am I going to do in the situation I find myself in? What choices will I make about my attitude in the middle of unjust suffering? Will I allow my experience to make me better or bitter?

Ivan wrestled with these questions. When Makar Semyonitch entered the prison camp and Ivan began to suspect that it was he who killed the merchant and set Ivan up to take the rap for it, Tolstoy writes of Ivan:

“He longed for vengeance, even if he himself should perish for it.”

Ivan had chosen to let the evil that befell him make him bitter.For twenty-six years that bitterness had been eating Ivan alive from the inside out and left him a shadow of his former self. Ivan’s bitterness was like him swallowing poison and then waiting for Makar Semyonitch to die. And when Makar didn’t die Ivan toyed with finishing him off himself.

That bitterness came to a head when Ivan determined that Makar Semyonitch was responsible for his being sent to prison. Infected by the snake bite of bitterness, all Ivan could think about was passing the venom of bitterness along.

But Ivan had been injected with the antidote for bitterness. And that antidote was also silently at work within him. In our last post on this topic we will reflect on the antidote to bitterness caused by evil that befalls us unjustly.