hurl your anger at God

I have a friend whom I’ve known for years, yet hardly know at all really, because she never reveals enough of her true self to anyone, including me.  I don't think she trusts people enough, to reveal to them who she really is.

She gets quite depressed and angry about things at times, but I struggle to know how to help her, because I don’t really understand her, or know the triggers or the causes of her distress. She seems to have a lot of self-loathing. Maybe she feels like she’s never living up to expectations others have of her. I suppose we are all a bit like that because we all grow up wanting to please our parents.  We all suffer a bit from feeling we have failed their expectations a little.

But my friend’s anger seems very deeply ingrained and is, I suspect, tied to her sense of value as a person, ie she feels worthless as a person because she isn’t living up to what others expect of her. Perhaps she feels she has to gain their approval in order to gain their love. She can be quite callous though;  almost verging on cruel.  She’s caustic and harsh and unkind sometimes.  But then I think she feels guilty about that;  she doesn’t like who she is when she’s like that, and that reinforces the self-loathing. I’m not sure how you overcome that.

I think she doesn’t actually let the spirit of Jesus walk with her.  She has a “set of rules” faith and is trying very hard to be loving and gracious but fails, because a) it’s not an inherent part of her blueprint, but something she feels she should be as a Christian; and b) you can never really live the precepts of Christ, unless you let his spirit rule in your heart.  She doesn’t get it, that obedience to Him is not just “obeying” a set of rules, but handing over your will to His will;  subsuming your nature to His; letting go of it and allowing Him to live through you.

She doesn’t seem to grasp the idea of a living relationship with God.

I suppose in the end we all have to find our own way of dealing with bad stuff.  I loaded it onto God – pleading, praying, railing at Him;  hurling anger at him; criticising Him;  doubting Him.  But at least I was talking to Him – and I was confronting the issues.  It was painful and took ages, but I was, all the time, actually leaning on Him and learning about myself;  the mistakes I made and why I made them, and just what makes me tick.  I was still inviting Him to share the travail with me even when I shouted at him “What the hell do you think you’re doing God!?!;  and “It’s SO hard to follow you Jesus and I’m sick of it being this hard!!”;  and “why don’t you sod off and discipline someone else for a change??!”. 

Sometimes, as Christians we seem afraid of our emotions and we deny them/sanitise them/divert them.  We don’t like confronting them, because we, like my friend, think that God will not approve. And it's painful to look at who we really are.

But God loves honesty;  he invites confession and listens as we pour out our poison to Him.  It’s been my experience that He rarely gives an answer immediately;  He seems to allow us to find our own time and would have us learn about ourselves in the process. 

When bad things happen to us, it’s natural to get angry, sad, depressed, disappointed;  a dozen other emotions may assail us. It’s when we bury these under the sniping face of unkindness and hard-hearted cynicism, or braying self-pity;  or shackling denial,  that we turn off God’s empowering pathway to wholeness and become bogged down in the nettles of festering bitterness and revenge, or destructive anger.  We allow what’s happened to fester and infect our hearts, minds, souls.  And we can’t connect to God, because we are holding all that anger inside.  We are saying (for whatever well-meaning, supposedly-noble motive) that we can fix it ourselves;  that  God will not love us if He knows we’re angry.

He knows anyway. Better to hurl it at Him.  It gets it out of our heads and hearts.  He can dissolve our anger because He will love us still, no matter how much we blame Him/criticise Him/doubt Him. He loves our honestly and can work with that to heal us.

I can see how God used the awful stuff in my life to actually heal me from the weaknesses and frailties to which I was prone.  I can see how much more self-esteem I have, for example, by having to plough through my husband’s abuse and rejection of me. I can see how I’ve developed and grown as a person – more rounded, secure and happy.