Avoiding anger by addressing it at its roots

Everyone gets angry. Too few try to understand why it happens.

It is completely unacceptable to simply say, “Well, that’s how I am – that’s how God made me.” At best, it’s wrong. At worst, it’s a bald lie. Functionally, it’s a resignation of sorts, a way of “giving in” to a destructive weakness.

Accepting or even embracing this weakness is nothing less than admitting defeat. Part of what makes anger so insidious is that it is almost never a victimless outburst. There is commonly collateral damage, others who end up wounded by anger’s harm. Unfettered anger ends up spraying shards of discord and animosity amongst people who could otherwise be in unity. Anger is destructive. It destroys all parties.

It is one thing to ask “What makes you angry?” But another thing altogether to ask, “Why are you angry?” The “what” is an endless list that certainly includes getting your pizza delivered with the toppings stuck to the box, politics and social issues, or telemarketers and email SPAM. Found beneath this ever-growing list is the other question about the “why” of anger. Candidly, this is the far more important question to address.

This reasons for “why” could be an equally broad list as the “what” list, but most of the “why” reasons find shade under these three generalized explanations/triggers:

1. I’ve been wronged.
2. I’ve been offended.
3. I’ve been inconvenienced.

If any one of these is the “why,” then reason demands that there is a wrong-doer, an offender, an inconvenience-er who needs to be held in account for making you feel this way. You see, the angry person is a self-perceived victim. As such, the angry person is also is self-justified in their anger. Consequently, the victim becomes an offender (a wrong-doer, an offender, and inconvenience-er — all/each as an expression of executing justice against the perceived wrongdoing/wrongdoer).

This is predictably destructive: Typically, the “victim” explodes at the “offender” in judgment or implodes inward in an indirect attempt to penalize the other. In either scenario, the result is almost always detrimental, the carnage afterward is usually worse than the original situation, and the original situation is never any closer to being remedied.

The route to overcoming anger is not found in anger management techniques. That’s why they are called what they are. They manage anger that’s already there…and they are useful for that purpose. A better solution is to develop strategies that avoid anger altogether by providing better responses, so as to minimize those circumstances when anger management becomes necessary. With that in mind, here’s a few ideas to help avoid anger:

Keep Perspective. Offenses fall into two categories, and having a proper perspective on the offense helps to produce a proper reaction.
- Unintentional offenses either occur by accident or in ignorance, so treat them as such and respond to the offender with grace. Accidents happen, and a lot of them have happened at your own hand.
- Intentional offenses were committed on purpose. This gives you a great opportunity for a quick self-assessment (did you do something to provoke the offense?), and either be humble for your provocation, or (if you have been truly victimized) use the offense as your opportunity meet with God and let him control your response. Be humble enough with God to recognize that you at times still offend God with your thoughts or deeds and he still forgives you. This is an opportunity for you to put your faith into practice and forgive as you’ve been forgiven.
Appeal to a Higher Court. Anger is the verdict of judgment pronounced by a merciless judge. The problem is, that job is above your pay grade and you haven’t been promoted into that role by the One who rightly sits in the seat of judgment. Accordingly, you will often make your judgments with too shallow of perspective, too little knowledge of too few of the details, and too insignificant of an understanding. So your judgment is flawed, your punishment is unjust and ineffective, and the victim (yourself) ends up bearing the burden of the judgment even more often than intended condemned, the offender. If you have been wronged, your job is to appeal to God for judgment (and justice), and trust that He will make the proper judgment against the offense. Doing so releases you from responsibilities you were never designed to effectively accomplish and frees you to forgive, to love, and to grow.
Forgive. Forgiveness is a supernatural action, requiring overcoming your natural will that demands for accountability. Not only are you releasing judgment to the higher court, but you are actively absolving the offender of the action. There is a lot to risk in forgiving – a lack of repentance, an acceptance of the potential for being perceived as weak and/or gullible, and the very palpable risk of a repeat offense. Even so, the risks of not forgiving are much greater and far more assured. Forgiveness is a great act of faith that is much more about your belief in God and his justice than it is in any way about any expectation of reaction you may anticipate on the part of the offender.
Deal in Short Accounts. Partake in actions 1-3 on an regular basis, as often as necessary. I once had a guy try to tell me that as long as he dealt with his anger before he died, he was being biblical. The Bible says “don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” This means deal with it on a daily basis, not on an annual one (or longer). When anger goes unresolved, it festers. And just like any other festering abscess, the infection causes pus that stinks, a wound that is tender and sore, that seeps and doesn’t heal. Even in the best cases, these unattended wounds leave a nasty scar. The longer it goes unchecked, the more damage it wreaks and the more it immobilizes the wounded person. Go quickly in humility to those others who have offended you, and keep your account short. One important note – the only way to do that is to keep your own account of offenses against God equally short. This axiom reveals the direct relationship with your ability to keep short accounts with others.

I encourage you to be more merciless with the roots of your own anger than you tend to be with the objects of your anger. Remember that the object of your anger is a real person…don’t objectify them. Don’t de-humanize them or reduce them to their offense to justify your wrath. God doesn’t do that with you and he doesn’t want you to do that to others.

(2010-2019)

It’s 2020. I’m 47 years old. I remember when I was a child, the year 2000 seemed like a Science Fictionally distant impossibility, trying to imagine what it would be like to be an adult in an age with teleports, personal butler robots, and the skies filled with flying cars that have revolutionized travel. Now, today is twenty years beyond that once-faraway date, and things are not anything like I’d imagine they’d be.

The Jetsons, from a 2017 DC Comics re-imagining.

No teleports. Siri and Alexa are the closest I can get to a personal butler robot, and both my feet are still planted on terra firma for all my localized travel. Yet, I doubt my 1984 self would believe me if my 2020 self reported that today I’d carry in my front pocket a computer just a bit larger than an index card, and on it, I could:

and I haven’t even mentioned the wristwatch…

watch virtually any movie , TV show, or live media I’d ever want at any time I wanted
have a real-time video conversation with someone virtually anywhere in the world
have access to virtually any of history’s information within a few taps on a screen
play a multitude of games with virtually anyone on any other part of the globe
catalog all my life’s events in photos, videos, and text and coordinate it with the catalog of other people’s, in real-time
do so much more, if I can just keep from accidentally dropping it in the toilet when I’m clumsily flushing.

New accomplishments and advances make it easy to be so amazed at where we are and where we’re going that we take for granted from where we’ve come. I can remember when my phone number was just 4 digits and our phone was a shared “party line” with the neighbors down the road. Today, everyone in my family has their own 10-digit number, even when we’re all in the same room together. Moreover, we’ve taken detailed pictures of the solar system, explored Mars, and discovered the sequence of DNA. Admittedly that’s a pretty liberal use of “we” here, but you get my point.

It happens on the grand, global scale and it happens on the small family and individual scales, too. There’s this little sentence tucked away in the first few sentences of the Bible’s story of Ruth that cause me to appreciate this tendency to lose the tree for the forest (don’t worry, this blog entry isn’t a Bible study):

*Photo: © Demart Pro Arte®/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.*

1 In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land. So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. ²The man’s name was Elimelek, his wife’s name was Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem,Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there.³Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons. ⁴They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth. After they had lived there about ten years, ⁵both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.
Ruth 1:1-5, NIV

I bolded it so you wouldn’t miss it. It’s such a throw-away detail, but perhaps because its 2020 and the turn of a new decade, it seems to carry more weight than just a heavier font might indicate. This story opens with a scant flyover introduction to this Jewish man and his family who moved to a foreign land because of a drought. Within 3 sentences, 2 marriages, 3 deaths and 10 years pass. I understand that it’s a summary supplied to bring the reader current. It also strikes me just how much life ends up getting lived in a span of 10 years. Life that often gets proverbially packed into the hyphen between the two dates listed. I suppose if you were to ask Naomi, she may not be so summarily flippant about those 10 years. In that decade:

She as a younger woman moved her family in desperation to a strange land with unknown customs, simply to survive. Surely that was no easy re-lo.
She saw her boys become men, moving out of childhood into adulthood.
She experienced the death of her husband, leaving her in this foreign community without her closest companion.
She welcomed two new Gentile women into her family, daily navigating the new relationships where cultures, faiths, traditions, and beliefs all collided.
She shepherded these two young daughters-by-marriage through their own grief of loving their spouses, even amidst dealing with her own sense of loss over the death of her sons.

While the overlay isn’t exact to the calendar decade, this new decade will conclude my 40s decade and oversee most of my 50s. In our (Kelli & mine) 40s, we’ve seen our kids become adults, our home begin its transition from a hub of constant activity to a nest empty of its hatchlings. While we’ve enjoyed the stability of our ministries and our clear sense that God has placed us here, we’ve also been challenged by the distance from loved ones. In this decade past, we’ve walked through and (by God’s grace) overcome a cancer diagnosis. We’ve lived 3,652 days (and counting) of living during that decade…days marked by all the same things that uniquely distinguish all of our days: love, joy, accomplishment, success, renewal, victory, but also sadness, setback, failure, disappointment, discouragement, and loss.

I’m grayer than I was, but not as gray as I’m going to be. Hopefully, I’m wiser than I was, but not as wise as I will be in the future. I so look forward to my own kids’ marriages. I look forward to their welcoming children into their families. I look forward to continuing to be useful in the things that God is doing all around me. I look forward to meeting new people, making new friends, facing new challenges, learning new lessons, and growing in new ways (that at times will certainly be painful). To be sure, the fullness of having lived the life that is now behind me causes me to reflect; but mostly, I look forward.

When the storm comes: past storms (part 3)

In my previous post, I mentioned that I believe there were two events that radically altered the earth’s environment. The first event was the original rebellion of man against God. That rebellion changed the earth from its utopian origins to its dystopian present, replete with destructive storms.

This first event was the precursor to the second event. After the first event, humanity moved forward in its “new normal.” A family became a clan, the clans divided and claimed new territory. Populations grew and generations passed.

Every person and every generation existed in the “new normal.” Each person’s death recalled the original rebellion. As the population expanded and generations passed, the story was changed or forgotten. As time passed, people grew more distant from God.

The Bible reports that after ten generations, God determined to judge the world’s population for its rebellion (and the details of his judgment can fill an entirely different post). He chose a global flood of waters as his means of judgment.

Giving 100 years of warning, he set aside one lone family to escape the judgment. The patriarch of this family, Noah, began to build a boat (as God commanded) to withstand and endure the judgment. He did so in a world that possibly, had never seen rain fall from the sky. Who knows what people thought of Noah or even said to him over that 100 years of ark-building. That no other people were allowed to join him on the boat allows for the fair assumption that they likely reasoned that the world could never exist differently than how they had experienced it. Then the time arrived.

On the 17th day of the second month of Noah’s 600th year, waters fell from the sky an a way unprecedented in world history.

It would be inadequate to think only that it rained. Instead, imagine a drenching rain where you’ve sought refuge under a tarp, tent, or canopy. You see the canopy sag as it becomes water-logged. At first, a few beads of water soak through, dripping overhead. Then, suddenly, without warning, the canopy rips with a load tear and you are blanketed by a sheet of water that literally knocks you off your feet.

This is what the Bible says happened, except on a global scale. The Bible says that in the creation, God had blanketed the earth with a canopy of water. At this time of judgment, God released this canopy and its waters plummeted upon the earth. The volume of water overwhelming the earth is unimaginable, even in light of our modern-day comparative calamities.

Compounding the disaster, the Bible says that God caused the waters under the earth to spring forth. These were no bubbling brooks of natural springs. Its appropriate to think of violent earthquakes, oceanic volcanoes, and tumult that results in landscapes like Colorado’s Flatirons mountains. This was happening on a global scale. Oceans of waters from above. Geysers of waters from the ground.

Chaos.

With each new violent storm, we see a new library of videos of violent winds pushing walls of water, sweeping parking lots of cars into and then through buildings. Homes, offices, and stores instantly are deconstructed as the unrelenting force of the waves pushes against and ultimately over them. Stories are shared of a man being found on a roof six miles out in the ocean, or of a dolphin rescued one mile inland.

In light of this modern evidence, I have no problem reconciling why I will find an unbalanced boulder atop a mountain in the middle of the rockies, or sea life fossils in the middle of the continental land mass. In this, I see evidence of God using nature as a means of both judgment and new beginnings.

Being “the least of these”

It’s difficult for me to be “one of the least of these.”

I find tremendous fulfillment in being someone who can bring a cup of water or a bit of food or some much-needed clothing to someone in need. I enjoy the peace-bringing satisfaction of bringing hope to someone in despair. I cherish the biblical principal that when I do something for those in need, it is as though I do it unto the Lord Himself.

Yet, here I am finding myself in need, and I can’t hardly stand it. I feel like a user, a taker. I feel helpless and I don’t like it. I have to rely on others for my needs, and my needs are causing others to re-orient their lives around my schedule.

This struggle can be reduced to a single word. Probably the biggest five-letter four-letter word in my life.

Pride.

A paradox of my life is that I want to be a person who “has it all” so I can declare, “The Lord has given everything and to Him I give my praise.” It’s as though I fail to recognize when I have very little that this which I do have I only possess because of God, as well. But I do recognize it. I just don’t seem to appreciate it as much.

I hate this about me.

In the theological, ideological, theorhetical, philosophical sense, I appreciate God’s gifts amidst these circumstances even more, because I am so much in need. My very livelihood, my very future is dependent upon the sacrifice and generosity of others right now. But in the practical sense, I think my tepid joy is the result of not wanting to sully the name of Christ by being in need.

Isn’t that just silly?

I think of Job. This man lost everything. No home. No family. No Possessions. No prosperity. Nothing. He didn’t even have a network of supportive friends to give him wise counsel. And he was able to praise God and be content with nothing because he had God.

More appropriately, God had him.

And to Job, that was sufficient.

I desperately want that to be sufficient in my own life. But all my fleshly insecurities get in the way.

What will my wife think?

What will my children think?

What will our parents think?

What will nonbelievers think?

What will believers think?

And its only through the process of writing out this self-disclosure that I realize that I’ve missed the only opinion that really matters…

What does God think?

God ordains circumstances in my life for one reason.

That I will bring glory to Him.

Anything else, everything else is subordinate.

I must cease compromising God’s greatest purpose for my life for lesser ones.

I do have so much more than what Job had. So why do I focus on that which I do not have?

Because I need things?

In one sense, I do.

But to even say so, am I saying that I need something other, apart from God?

My prayer is to know what God knows I need. To be satisfied with what God says should satisfy me. To have the wisdom to discern what I need from what I only think I need. And to praise God in all times in all ways for the glory of His name’s sake.