A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger ….
Mockers stir up a city, but wise men turn away anger. …
A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control.
An angry man stirs up dissension, and a hot-tempered one commits many sins.
For as churning the milk produces butter, and as twisting the nose produces blood, so stirring up anger produces strife.
Character Check How would my colleagues or spouse say I handle my anger?
In Business Terms Lots of people have the power to hurt or frustrate me. Only one has the power to make me angry. Me. If it’s true that no one else can make me angry, it’s 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 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 human activity outside 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 eleven-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 that 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.
—John Ortberg
Something to Think About We need not “sin that grace may abound.” We are sinners and need only to confess that grace may abound. – C. FitzSimons Allison
