Anger

I have fought a long and rearguard action against anger.

I come by anger honestly in that sense:  my father, especially when he was younger, had a temper - which in due time I inherited. I never had it quite to his extent, for whatever reason - either my mother's direct influence or simply less to be angry about.  My temper was always there of course, ready to flair at a moment's notice - not with physical violence (never that; the one fight I have every been involved in was in the fourth grade; it ended when I hurled my skateboard at my opponents and fled the scene).

I say "my father's anger"; having come to understand him more over the years I have come to understand some of the root of that anger:  an older brother tragically killed by a drunk driver and  his oldest brother took care of his youngest siblings and my grandfather took care of my grandfather; my father was effectively on his own to deal with the loss of his closest in age sibling likely did not assist his own father, who was apparently the classic drinking and swearing man before his conversion to Christ and the Baptist Church.

The last argument my father and I ever had was well over 25 years ago; I think I have told the story, but a small accident that I was unwilling to tell him about blossomed into a shouting match.  He said I never told him anything. I retorted back he never reacted well when I had bad news.  I stormed out down to the park at the end of the street; he came down and found me and apologized.  Never after that day did we have a fight; in fact on more than one occasion if he seemed angry, he apologized for it later.

(Turns out I did write about it here.)

My last argument was, perhaps appropriately enough, with one of my own children.  It was over an issue which impacted none of us directly but she was passionate and then I became passionate. It ended with me raising my voice and effectively shutting down the argument.  That never happened again, but we - and I mean all of us now - never discussed things like politics or religion after that.   

I "won", but effectively I lost.

(It is fine now of course, and in the intervening years we have enjoyed many conversations and adventures all together.  But some subjects are not spoken of and likely will never be again.)

Never in all my years have I been convinced of a thing by the anger of another.  Likely never in my years have I convinced another by my anger.  It can feel good, in that sense, to be enthused and excited about a subject, to feel the passion of "the righteous cause". Sometimes we even point to the idea of "righteous anger".  I suspect, in God's economy, a lot less of us have the benefit of righteousness in our anger than we care to believe.

There is a last thing, of course:  to the quote above, I think it is fair to say that never once have I felt God's presence in my anger.  It has been as if He packed up and left the minute my temper raised and only returned when, alone and exhausted, I see the destruction that my anger has wrought.

Anger, like arrows, can never be recalled once loosed.  They can only be painfully dug out of the flesh of those to whom it was directed against.