Lots of people have the power to hurt or frustrate me. Only one has the power to make me angry.
Me.
If it is true that no one else can make me angry, it is even more true that no one else can make me respond aggressively or inappropriately when I feel anger. It often seems that way because my response to feeling anger has become so routine that it seems “automatic.” It feels as if the person or event triggered my anger and caused my response.
The truth is my response is learned behavior. I learned it long ago, from people I grew up around, learned it so informally that I was not aware that I was learning anything.
Tommy Bolt has been described as the angriest golfer in the history of a game that has stimulated the secretion of more bile than any other single human activity outside of war and denominational meetings. One (possibly apocryphal) story recalls a time he was giving a group lesson on how to hit a ball out of a sand trap. He called his 11-year-old son over.
“Show the people what you’ve learned from your father to do when your shot lands in the sand,” he said. The boy picked up a wedge and threw it as high and as far as he could.
The good news is what can be learned can be unlearned. It is possible for me to manage my anger in a God-honoring way: to “be angry and sin not.” Anger is an inescapable fact of life. But the experience of anger is different from the expression of anger. What I do with that anger, how I express and manage it, is another matter.
—John Ortberg, teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois. To comment on this devotional, e-mail Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.
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