A fool gives full vent to anger, but a wise person quietly holds it back…A hot-tempered person starts fights and gets into all kinds of sin. Proverbs 29:11,22
Lots of people have the power to hurt or frustrate me. But whether or not I express my anger when they do is my choice. People don’t “make me” angry; I allow myself to express my anger. No one else can make me respond aggressively or inappropriately when I feel anger. It often seems just the opposite 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, so many of my responses to anger result from learned behavior. I learned it long ago, from people I grew up around. And I learned it so informally that I was not even aware of it.
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 when he was giving a group lesson on how to hit a ball out of a sand trap.
Calling his eleven-year-old son over, he said, “Show the people what you’ve learned from your father when your shot lands in the sand.” The boy picked up a wedge and threw it as high and as far as he could.
Anger is an inescapable fact of life. But the experience of anger is different from the expression of anger. What I do with my anger, how I express it and manage it, is another matter. The good news is that what we have learned we can also unlearn. It is possible for me to manage my anger in a God-honoring way: to be angry and not sin.
—John Ortberg
Reflection
How would my colleagues or spouse say I handle my anger?
Prayer
God of peace and wisdom, give me a perspective that will help keep me from anger, and when I do get angry, give me the discernment to manage it in ways that will honor you and not hurt others needlessly.
“We need not ‘sin that grace may abound.’ We are sinners and need only to confess that grace may abound.”
—C. FitzSimons Allison, retired Episcopal bishop and theologian
Leadership DevotionsCopyright Tyndale House Publishers.Used by permission.
