Anger

Sometimes I have wondered if I get mad too much. I get worked up by something that happens, or by something that I hear or read. I get angry in conversations with people, I get mad when I see people doing things they shouldn't be doing. Sometimes it really doesn't take too much to get me really riled up.

I just watched a NOOMA video. I am sure that some of you are familiar with these. The guy who hosts them is named Rob Bell, and some of the things he says really get me thinking. The video I just watched was called "Store" and it was about anger. Rob Bell talks about how if you walk around our society, you are bound to see rage all around. People flipping others off in traffic, people losing it in line at the grocery store, the examples really aren't too hard to think of. There are people walking around who are just ready to explode with anger. He then goes on to talk about how anger is a normal emotion, and the important thing isn't to avoid getting angry, but rather to figure out what is making us angry, and where our anger is leading.

The passage of Scripture used in the video was Mark 3:1-5. This is the story where Jesus is about to heal a man on the Sabbath, and the teachers of the law are waiting to accuse him for it. It says that Jesus looked at them in anger, because they were too stubborn to see the truth. Jesus got angry. And he used his anger for a cause. He healed the man with the crippled hand. Rob Bell says that Jesus' anger "increases the peace of the world. It leads to this good deed that makes things better." He goes on to talk about how our anger can lead to selfish ends, or we can use anger to lead to things that are good and beautiful. And then he said something that I really liked:

"When we are talking about calling and mission and vocation and purpose, what we're going to give our lives to, one of the questions we often ask is, 'What do you love?' But there's another question that we can ask. 'What makes you angry?'"

Wow! Isn't that something to think about? Obviously there are lots of things that people get angry about that really aren't important at all, but what about the things that do matter? What are the things that are bigger than you that make you mad? What are the causes that you get really worked up about that you realize something needs to be done about? What are the issues that make you so mad that it hurts? Isn't that where we should be living and working and spending ourselves? Yours might not be the same things that get me mad, but that's good, because there are far too many things that need to be changed in this world for any of us to take care of all of them. Anger has this energizing effect. It gets you going and makes you act. Things get done when anger is behind them. And often the results aren't pretty. We should be using that motivation for something good. Rob Bell talked about how the people he knew who had given their lives to a cause were usually the ones who didn't get worked up about the unimportant everyday incidents that happened. They were the ones who had figured out how to use their anger for good, because life is about something bigger than them. Some things are going on in the world that somebody needs to get angry about, and that anger is only good for anything if it leads to action. Maybe God wants to do something through that anger that is inside you and me. Maybe it is there for a reason.

So, what makes you angry?