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. 

Managing anger

For many of us, when bad, unjust things happen to us, one of the responses we feel is anger.

Anger is a most difficult feeling to deal with.  It can be extremely destructive, not only damaging the people around us, but destroying our own peace and happy state of mind too.  Anger and happiness do not go together.  I have found the only real way to deal with it is to tell God you are angry and why.  He’s big enough;  he can bear it.  Give it to Him;  tell him you don’t want it any more. Of course, that involves making a choice;  deciding that you no longer want anger to be in your heart.  While ever you hold on to it (bear a grudge) then God cannot take it from you.
 

For me, I became so unhappy, so bogged down in negative thoughts that the anger and self pity became like a great stone I was carrying around inside.  I wanted it to go away.  I didn’t want anger to have it’s terrible hold over me.  I surrendered my “right” to be angry, to God, and eventually, as I continued to do this, he eventually began to dissolve the anger. I’m not saying it’s easy.  I battled on trying to overcome it, being on an emotional see saw for years, but finally, I got so sick of my selfishness making me so unhappy that in the end, surrender became easier.

I realized too, that caring people can be angry because of the very fact that they care.  When you or loved ones suffer abuse or injustice, part of the caring is .... anger.  Seems funny put that way.  It's hard to deal with anger because it's an emotion;  if it was just a intellectual thought, you could just put it off.  But you feel anger in your soul and your heart and God is really the best one to deal with that. 

Seek counselling too.  Talking about it to someone else, preferably neutral, is good. Dealing with anger which has resulted from someone else's treatment of you is difficult too, especially if there has been no repentence or resolution from that person.  But you still have to deal with it, and when you hang onto the anger, you are letting that person win over and over again. You are letting that person rule you and your happiness.

Let it go.  Make the choice to face the anger, decide to let it go.  Then walk that path, gradually dropping the stones out of your pocket.