I have gone bitter about something that happened, and I can hear it now in how I talk about people. I do not like who I am becoming.

“And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.”

Naomi comes back to Bethlehem after ten years in Moab, having buried a husband and two sons, and tells the women not to call her Naomi, which means pleasant, but Mara, which means bitter. Scripture lets her say it without correcting her. It also does not leave her there. Her honesty about what loss had done to her is the beginning of the story, not the end of it.

“Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled;”

The writer is addressing believers under sustained pressure who are quietly drifting, and he uses a gardening image: a root of bitterness that springs up and defiles many. The point is that resentment does not stay contained inside the person carrying it. It leaks into unrelated relationships. He treats it as something to be watched for early, like a weed, rather than as a verdict on your character.