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.

leeches and small boys

Disasters happen.... It was a very small disaster;  of no great significance, except to those concerned.  (some might find this true story a little gross! But it's nothing very awful.)

I have a memory, snapped years ago and preserved, like all our memories in the unchangeable sepia photographs of our minds.

My husband was the only teacher in a tiny school near Mudgee NSW.  There was a fairly large complement of kids in those years, scattered through the grades like dissimilar pebbles in a conglomeration of the rocky outcrops from which their surroundings were made.  They were all so different and yet they were all the same;  lively, likeable products of their farming origins.

It was hard, harsh country, almost on the snow line between Mudgee and Bathurst.  At first, to my unknowing eye, it was a poor, stringy landscape, a meagre substitute for the fertile rolling hills of my childhood farm. I learned soon, that the sheep which roamed it’s flinty hillsides, produced wool which would eventually, with prosperous regularity,  be made into fine wool suits;  elegant garments which would rest, cloistered, in the quiet and dignified atmosphere of some of London’s poshest menswear shops, waiting for elegant, dignified Englishmen to buy them.

But I digress.  I must hurry on and tell you about this disaster.

The summers in [ privacy thingy  ], which was the name of the villiage, would fling their brief, baleful heat at the countryside before retreating, beaten by the altitude into an almost autumnless winter.  The local kids would fill the brief  summer days with boisterous stints of activity at the local waterhole.  It was a fairly deep pool,  with rocky sides defining it’s spring-fed depths.  Even in the heat of summer, the water was cold. It was a pretty spot, partly overhung with Eucalypts, where the water was dappled by the filtering sun. As well, there were flat rocks in the full glare of the sun and the kids would stretch out like lizards on them.

On one occasion, we sat draped about the banks in clumps of wet humanity.  After a bit one of the kids called out to me.

          “Hey Miss, come and look at these.”  This was from Chris, a fair-headed, sun-freckled boy on the verge of the turbulent adolescent years.  He was all bravado and postering;  a leader amongst his peers.  I picked my way along the bank to where a group of boys was propped together like old-fashioned hay stooks, looking at something held by James.   Into my hands he  tumbled a bundle of little skinny sticks which were all roughly the same size and colour;  almost identical.  I turned them over in my hands. “Where did you get these?” I asked, puzzled. 

          “On the rocks, down in the water, all over” they pointed and threw generous arms out to indicated how wide was their catchment area.

“But what are they?” I looked down at their newly-silent, squinting faces and fell right into their game.

Chris was quiet for a moment, gathering everyone’s full attention, then he said “Well, actually, they’re these”.  He took me over and began to explain the gory process.  Aparently, as is the grissly inclination of small boys, they were in the habit of collecting leeches, impaling them on slender sticks; turning their bodies inside out on the sticks, putting them into the sun to dry and then extracting the sticks, so that the dried leech body remained, forever rigidly repenting of it’s parasitic lifestyle.

I told you it was a disaster.  But only for the unfortunate leeches.

an interaction with a saint of God

I always love the interaction I sometimes have with an elderly gent of my acquaintance;  a saint of God;  one of Nature’s Gentlemen.  He has a self-effacing and gentle personality which manifests itself sometimes in a slight stutter if he gets nervous or stressed.

He’s a man of very modest means, evidenced by his very ordinary house, in a less-than-desirable suburb.    I had occasion to call on him recently to get him to sign a document.  When I knocked on the door, I noticed his Christmas wreath still hung on the screen. Well, it’s only April, after all. It was an ancient thing of faded baubles and plastic holly;  probably purchased in the 60’s.  I picked it’s vintage because we had similar Christmas decorations which were hung in our house year after year, until my sister finally said they had to go.  They were for us, as for him, humble markers of a make-do-and-mend lifestyle. All the same, I chuckled gently to myself, at the thought of him putting it there in the time-honoured fashion of Christmas, and then just forgetting it was there for months afterwards.

I could hear him hurrying to the door at my knock.  He was effusive in his apologies for the mess of the place.  “Don’t worry! It looks fine to me….. for a “Bachelor Pad” I quipped.  He chortled gently at the joke.  He is indeed a bachelor, albeit an elderly one.  His house, though, far from being the sleek and urbane dwelling usually conjured up by such a phrase, is full of his wife’s touch; the pictures of their children on the walls;  the slightly jaded furniture showing evidence of his continued care;  the pot plants on the verandah still watered and nurtured.  It’s the same house all his children grew up in;  the same house in which he cared for his wife, until her death 6 years ago, from cancer.  I remember the date, because it was only a few months before my son's death.  My very first acquaintance with this godly man was a conversation about losing loved ones.  I don’t know if he saw the grief in my face, but I certainly saw it in his. I heard it in his voice too, as he spoke of his wife with love and respect; and of how much he missed her.  He told me “the sicker she got, the more I loved her”. We sat in a silent space then, and cried for our absent loved ones.  
I can always sense the noble traces of the spirit of Jesus on this lovely man. Go in peace, saint of God, go in peace

scars and healing

After the resurrection of Christ, the scars of His recently-crucified body were still evident.  He was still in His earthly body after all.

Sometimes the healed wounds of my earthly suffering still cause me pain.  But the still-evident scars on the body of the Christ help me to uderstand that complete healing will only come when I too, am given a new eternal body.

I have always tried to deal with the pain and the angst, then pack it away in the tin trunk of my heart, and don't open it again.  But it isn't always possible.  Sometimes the wounds ache;  sometimes I get tired of carrying them in my soul. 

But realizing that even Christ still bore the scars of his sacrifice, helps me to be gentle on myself and understand that some scars will never be fully healed until that Resurrection morning.

a personal sharing

I was a child of the 50’s.  My parents were farmers.  They taught by example, and gave me an enduring demonstration of honesty, hard work and commitment to “the golden rule”.  I took on my mother’s Christian faith at an early age, and it has shaped and enriched my life. 

In 1975 I married a man who professed Christianity, but over the ensuing years, this façade fell away to reveal a manupulative and emotionally cruel man, and, in 1992, he left, leaving me to care and provide for our 3 children, without support from him in any way.  I went out to work and took out a mortgage to pay him his share of our home.   Thus began some very dark and difficult years, hallmarked by unrelenting hard work, lone responsibility and very frugal living.

I was working full time and I was alone.  I was breadwinner, home-maker, mother and father. During these years, there was the emotional turmoil of trying to come to terms with my divorce; there was the strain of coping with my increasingly hostile ex-husband and his troubled relationship with our children;  there was the death of my father;  there was much upheaval and persecution at work at one stage;  .  There seemed to be no part of my life which was happy or easy.   I felt marooned in a sea of undeserved dishonour and unrelenting difficulty. This continued year after year.

My life was like a little boat.  My children were precious cargo.  And I was rowing through a dark and terrible storm.  All around the waves crashed;  the lightning terrified us;  the thunder muddled my senses.  Still I rowed.  Eventually, my children grew into happy, strong, caring adults.  In 1996 I moved to another place and finally, there were mornings of sunshine and evenings of peace. .

My son, the oldest child, became a cabinet-maker, then embarked on a very difficult learning curve and became a policeman.  One daughter became a midwife and the other, an Occupational Therapist. 

My children and I become a very close family;  a closeness forged by commitment and hardship.   It was the delight and joy of my life, to see them together. They were the best thing I had from my dreadful marriage.

Then, in November 2006, my son was killed in a work accident in Sydney.  He was 27. I have no words to express the crushing grief of such news.   Yet even in those early moments, there was peace;  there was God saying “it’s OK, he’s safe with me.  

For long years after my divorce, it felt like there was a wasteland of broken ground inside me;  there had been such betrayal, such conflict;  so much call on all my resources;  so much unfulfilled hope;  so much disappointment;  so many oft-repeated prayers which seemed to remain unanswered.  God took a long time to heal this brokenness.  But He did.  I had to be healed all over again after my son died.  I am still walking that shadowed path really. God is still with me, and He is good.  But I want to tell you the other strategies I learned as well.

Preface

This blog will be written from personal experience.  I will be adding to it as I am able.  It's all in my head and heart. I have no degrees in psychology or human resources  This blog has been lived.  If you have had awful stuff happen to you and you don’t know how to cope or what to do next, or how to stop being scared, then this blog might help.

 Because I’ve been there too.

I speak of God in this book.  I want to make it very clear that when I say “God”, I mean a higher power.  My aim here is not to advance or preach the cause of any organised religion or faith.  Like people who attend AA, it’s good to have the assistance of a higher power when we are grappling with very complex and painful issues. 

I also need to be true to myself.  So I’m telling you that for me, that higher power has become very real to me through the presence of Jesus Christ and his “rules for living”. But if you have had a negative experience with the organised church, then this concept of God might be painful for you.  You may find a Buddhist God or a Hindu God more approachable.  If you are more comfortable with a “creator God” or a “Shepherd God”, then stay with that. I urge you to entrust yourself to a higher power;  the great Being who is the Alpha and Omega;  the intelligence behind this beautiful planet and all it’s wonders.

For me, the loving friendship of Christ has brought me through some of the worst experiences a human being can encounter.  But the purpose of this blog is not to preach at you, or convert you.  The purpose of this blog is simply to help you.

Doubt is not always a bad thing

Doubt can be a bridge between the Jesus we thought we knew, to Jesus as He really is.  If we stay with an intellectual, textbook type Sunday school image of who Jesus is, we have a powerless hard-to-live journey of following Jesus.  If the disciples had stuck to their idea of Jesus as a political King;  a leader of their people, they would never have realized His whole purpose of coming, dying and rising, to take on Himself all of our wretchedness.    It’s the same for us.  If we never question the Sunday school image we have of Jesus, against our own experience and existence in the real world, we won’t come to a relationship with the living, risen Christ.  He will remain a dead, intellectual figure that we really don’t understand at all.  He will remain a “head knowledge” God, without any interaction or connection with us in our everyday lives.

When we are in some trouble or anxiety, and we begin to doubt God’s care or purpose for us, it is not an easy time.  It’s accompanied by fear and turmoil and these things are very disturbing and by their very nature they are tyrannical.  They grip us with such intensity.  It seems we don’t have a moment’s rest.  We have on the on the one side, our picture of Jesus as a loving God of mercy; a generous Father figure;  a gentle shepherd who gathers his lambs and protects them.  And then, on the other side, we have whatever malady or circumstance has happened to us, and we can’t seem to reconcile the two. They seem to be incompatible.  How can God let this happen?  We wrestle with these questions.  We begin to cross the bridge of doubt.  It seems a perilous journey, filled with confusion and searching and conflict and perplexity. 

How can God be loving and caring yet allow our loved ones to suffer?  How can God be a God of justice when we have been blamed for something we didn’t do?  How can the gentle Shepherd allow a little child to suffer in the hands of a ruthless abuser?  Why does God not intervene when something bad is about to happen?  These are the big questions of life.  We don’t like tackling them.  We don’t like to question.  We don’t like admitting we have these dark mutterings in our hearts.  And our responses will perhaps be the same as the people in the Resurrection story. 

We, like Mary, can be overcome at first, with sorrow.  But you’ve got to also be encouraged by her story.  Jesus appears to her and she is ecstatic.  She runs to tell the others.  This can be our journey too, even in the face of sorrow, when we allow the presence of Jesus to come to us.  I think Mary of all the followers was the closest to understanding what Jesus was all about.

Or we can react with fear, like the disciples in the room with the doors locked.  It’s understandable, when confronted with a big life event, to be afraid.  Fear is crippling; it can be overwhelming.  It reduces us to jelly.    How can we not be afraid when we are confronted with serious illness or when our children are in trouble? But the most frequent command in the bible is “Do not fear”. We can tell Jesus we are afraid.  We hear him say to us as he said to the disciples in the locked room “Peace be with you”.  God’s peace is one of the best gifts he gives his saints. 

Or we can be like Thomas, and be honest and say “Show me who you are Lord.  I doubt; I’m hurting; I’m afraid; I’m sad”  And do you see what happens then?  Jesus come to Thomas and shows him the scars.  He says “blessed are you Thomas because you believe”.  He encourages us down the centuries when he says “blessed are you when you don’t see and yet believe”. 

You can’t always believe unless you have first doubted.  And there’s a world of difference between a doubter and an unbeliever.  The doubter is an honest person seeking an experience of God even in the midst of his own perilous circumstances;  an unbeliever is never interested in any kind of experience of or conversation with, God. A doubter is a person struggling to live an honest life, who has many questions of God;  An unbeliever doesn’t care about those things.  And Jesus receives our doubts as willingly and as generously as he values our faith;  he is well acquainted with human misunderstanding and frailty.  Our journey with him will be at times as bewildering as it was for those first disciples.

They cowered behind locked doors.  We too hide in fear, or are beset by doubt, even though we know we have the Risen Christ with us.  But take heart, on the other side of the doubt bridge, our immature, incomplete, inaccurate picture of Jesus will be left behind. We will know a fuller Jesus, a more completely loving Jesus, a wise Jesus who knows what’s best for us, even if it seems He does not.  We will know a Jesus who will share himself with us;  a Jesus who will make our lives a joy to live;  A Jesus who shares his spirit of peace with us throughout all aspects of our journey.

He has given us the HS which is His presence with us. He didn’t condemn Thomas for his honest doubt, and he won’t condemn us either.  In fact, He promises never to leave us;  he promises that we are kept by the power of God.  He promises that he will complete His good work in us. And he says, do not fear, only believe (Mark 5:36). 

When we keep our faults and doubts safely locked away, we don't grow; we are like a seed which never swells with new life but stays a tiny lifeless thing in the infertile soil of untested intellectual faith. But when we honestly tell God what troubles us, He comes into our hearts and fills us with a deeper, stronger, more effective faith. He doesn’t rebuke us, but empowers us with peace, and we are able to answer not just our own questions, but bring resolution and peace to others as well. 

Doubting is not meant to be a comfortable exercise.   When you question things like “does God really care about me, or Is God really in control of the world, there will be turmoil and searching and conflict and perplexity. But if we are to come to terms with the awful things which happen to us from time to time, there is sometimes the need to get it all out before the Lord, and ask and pray and question and learn.  If we are to know God on a deeper level, we must be willing to risk stepping out onto the hard cobblestones of doubt. I can tell you it will not be an easy experience, but it will be one in which Jesus will be with us.

 

I would encourage you to use the figurative fingers of doubt and put them into Jesus’ scars.  Let him show you his real self.  Let him appear to you in His resurrected God-head self.  He will be as gentle and compassionate to you as he was with his first disciples.