Anger
Jul 3rd, 2009 Posted in anger | no comment »My pastor, being the helpful fellow he is, gave me some stuff to read on anger and suggested I might want to wrestle with God a bit on this issue.
I’m thinking, “Eh, what do you know? You can ask any of my friends and I bet they will tell you I’m pretty hard to offend. I’m pretty calm under attack. I like to win people over, not stomp people into the ground. I don’t do rage.”
I have a reputation for being easy-going. Our house in Alaska was always full of needy people. People needing to be picked up at the airport and driven to doctors’ appointments, people needing money and food, people needing us to babysit their sled dogs and store their junk in our garage, and people needing me to take them shopping and to ship groceries to the village. (There were also some who came every year and spent their vacations fixing our house, building woodsheds, putting down flooring, installing water heaters…)
Since I always had a houseful of people coming and going at will and would do anything anyone asked and I never yelled at people, I thought I was never angry.
Well, that’s not true. I knew I was angry at some of them. I just thought it didn’t matter since I served them all and never blew up.
Then we adopted Shane.
I found out that I had a bad temper. I yelled at that poor little boy more than I’ve ever yelled at anyone.
Hey, I wasn’t the only one. We all yelled at Shane. I remember Nikki the Compassionate, when she was about two, stomping her foot and yelling, “Dane, dop dat!” And she’s told him to “stop that” at least once every day of her life since then, I think.
Shane, AKA Dr. Destructo, could make me so angry I’d lose all reason. And yet, I still thought I wasn’t an angry person, really. It was just Shane. He was a full-time bundle of supercharged sin and shenanigans that wore me to a frazzle.
And I think that most people who know me would say I’m not given to anger. I’m quick to apologize (even to Shane–especially to poor Shane), I’m not easily offended. I was talking to my mom and my sister today about it and they both said, “You’re the most mellow person around. You have never been angry.”
But God sees me a little more clearly than they do.
Sigh.
I had to deny a request my son made the other night. “It’s too dangerous, Shane. Believe me, I’d like to let you because it would be easier on me. But I love you too much to allow that.”
He hung his head. “Mom, sometimes I wish you didn’t love me so much.”
Yeah. I know the feeling, kid. God’s been loving me lately, and I sometimes wish he wouldn’t.
It’s not true that I’m not an angry person. My anger just doesn’t usually manifest itself in angry outbursts. My anger is manifest in my withdrawing emotionally from people. I still drive them to their doctors’ appointments and I still let them sack out on my couch and dig in my fridge and raid my bank account. I just don’t ever connect with them emotionally.
Only I wrote back in March, in a comment to my friend Suzan:
I think there is a time to confront in love and a time to silently model Christ’s love. I just don’t think there is a time to avoid unpleasant people.
When I wrote that, I was oblivious to the people I was avoiding emotionally.
I can see now that the reason my anger would come in outbursts toward Shane when it never did anywhere else is that I couldn’t distance myself from him emotionally. I loved him and I wasn’t about to withdraw from him, so my anger came out in yelling.
Others would never know I was angry at them, but they would also never know my friendship.
And what happened to the anger when I let it make me withdraw from someone? Sometimes the person would drift out of my life and it would just be a missed opportunity to love. Other times, if the person I was trying to avoid stayed too long at my house, my anger would turn into pretty serious hatred. I can I remember several people I hated over the last twenty-five years. I had to struggle and pray and learn to love every time. Sometimes I never did love them. They died or moved away before I managed to fix my heart.
So what makes me angry at people? I didn’t get angry at all the people who stayed in our house. I loved many of them. Most of them, probably. What causes me to love one guy who costs me and to hate another guy who costs me?
That’s not going to be a pretty discovery. I’m pretty sure.
I’m not going there today.
I’m going to take a nap today.
I wouldn’t put it past him. He probably has his wife and several of the elders and various other church members joining him in this. How does a sinner stand a chance in such a church?
Frankie Schaeffer wrote a scene in his novel 


