When I first got married I would get so angry with my wife that I would get in my car and go for a drive to calm down. You could measure the level of my anger by how many miles I drove before turning around. After becoming friends with a man with a temper similar to mine, I would sometimes drive over to his house and ask him to ride with me until I calmed down. He died a few years ago. I don’t remember the last time I took one of those cool-down drives, but it was a long time ago.
I am comfortable with anger. I am not comfortable with fear or sadness, so am prone to feeling angry when what is really troubling me is fear or sadness.
I got angry while reading a news report on a political topic today. To calm myself down, I decided to read the Bible for a while. Soon I got to this passage, “When the LORD saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time, he was sorry that he had ever made them and put them on the earth. He was so filled with regret that he said, “I will wipe out these people I have created, and also the animals and the birds, because I am sorry that I made any of them” (Genesis 6:5-7). My anger ran into God’s anger and mine deflated.
Maybe it was a coincidence that I came to this passage while angry myself. I don’t have any wise insights about God’s decision to reset the world with a great flood and start over with Noah and his family alone. But over the course of a few hours I came to realize that my underlying issue when reading the news report earlier in the day was fear and sadness.
I leap to anger when afraid or sad and that makes dealing with fear and sadness difficult. I wonder how many times I got in the car to deal with fear or sadness years ago.
One of these days, I am going to notice that I am feeling sad or afraid and I will start to smile. I will know that I have made progress because I didn’t travel through anger first.
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