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

On the Chimps that Roam the Web

"We mediocrities struggle at a different level, hoping that our own petty contributions, irrelevant and ephemeral as they are, will be puffed and acknowledged by others; and, in a sense, there is nothing we can do about that. I am a man divided against myself; I want to be the centre of attention because I am a fallen human being; I want others to know that I am the special one; and as long as the new me and the old me are bound together in a single, somatic unity, I will forever be at war with myself. What I can do, however, is have the decency to be ashamed of my drive to self-promotion and my craving for attention and for flattery and not indulge it as if it were actually a virtue or a true guide to my real merit. I am not humble, so I should not pretend to be so but rather confess it in private, seeking forgiveness and sanctification. And, negatively, I must avoid doing certain things. I must not proudly announce my humility on the internet so that all can gasp in wonder at my self-effacement. I must make sure I never refer to myself as a scholar. I must not tell people how wonderful I am. I must resist the temptation to laugh at my own jokes. I must not applaud my own speeches. I must deny myself the pleasure of posting other people's overblown flattery of me on my own website, let alone writing such about myself. I must never make myself big by clinging to the coat-tails of another. In short, I must never take myself too seriously.

Not even chimpanzees do that."

- Carl Trueman, Fools Rush In Where Monkeys Fear To Tread