Calling the Bluff on Anger

I almost figured in a road altercation this morning. I had just finished dropping my wife off to her usual shuttle service terminal, where she gets her ride to work, and was on my way home. I was about to make a left onto the main road that would take me home, having signaled my intention at the proper distance, when this car at the opposite lane suddenly shot up. I did make my left before this car could pass through, but not without having my ears blared at by an irate horn. In what I perceived was an injustice, I slowed my van just enough to give the offending car a look of taunting defiance. What I got in turn was the finger.

This incident taught me something about righteous indignation—I am often unable to discern the situations that call for it, and I often lack the good sense that makes one slow to anger, rendering me unfit for receiving the glory of the one who overlooks an offense (Proverbs 19:11).

Instead of having my temper blow up at my face when someone just as foolish calls my bluff, I must consider the One who never has the fear of meeting His match and yet prescribes patience, meekness, and longsuffering for His people because He Himself is the archetype of these virtues.

Perhaps, a deeper consideration of the decretive will of God would help me curb the anger that is often directed at mere trifles. The circumstances of life fall into their assigned places by design, and what haughty presumption would it be on my part to fume at instances wherein no explicit violation of God's prescriptive will is evident.

Indeed, be angry and sin not (Eph. 4:26), but this assumes an anger that is excited by infractions of God's revealed will, and even then the setting of the sun lays down the boundary beyond which even anger of the good kind has the potential of becoming bad.

With that said, I think easing off of metal music would do me good, too. LOL.

A good resource on anger by Ed Welch: The Madness of Anger