How Life Works: Wisdom Living from Proverbs
03/25/2001 - Manage Your Anger
This morning I want to talk about managing our anger. The book of Proverbs has a lot to say about anger management, because God knows the way we handle the emotion of anger has a lot to do with whether our lives are working well. Every day we see images on the news of people who aren't handling their anger very well and it causes lots of heartache.
As I was thinking about anger this week, I remembered a story about two baseball players. In his autobiography called, "Number One," Billy Martin, the hotheaded, former manager of the New York Yankees, tells the story of a hunting trip he took with the great Yankee slugger Mickey Mantle. They went down to Texas to hunt on the ranch of one of Mantle's friends and when they arrived, Mickey told Billy to wait in the car while he checked things out with his buddy.
He went up to the house and talked to his friend who quickly gave them permission to hunt, but then asked Mantle to do him a favor. Apparently his pet mule was going blind, and the rancher didn't have the heart to put him out of his misery. So he asked Mantle to shoot the mule for him. Mickey said, "Sure, that's no problem."
But when he got back to the car, he pretended to be angry. He had this big frown on his face and he slammed the door and told Martin that his friend wouldn't let him hunt on the ranch. He said, "I'm so mad at that guy I'm going to go out to his barn and shoot one of his mules."
So while he's driving like a maniac to the barn, Martin's pleading with him, "No Mickey, calm down. You can't do that. That's not right." "You want to make a bet, just watch me!" he shouted.
When they got to the barn, Mantle jumped out of the car with his rifle, ran inside and shot the mule dead. And as he was walking away, he heard two more shots. And as he ran back to his car, he saw Billy Martin standing there blowing the smoke off his gun. And Mickey yelled, "What are you doing?" Martin yelled back, with his face red with anger, "We'll show that son of a gun! I just killed two of his cows too!" Not the best form of anger management!
All of us get angry. It's one of the most common, most powerful human emotions we can feel. Hardly a day goes by for most of us without getting angry about something. Little things can make us angry like sitting in a traffic jam on 422 when you're supposed to be at a meeting at work or at dinner with your family or like not finding a parking place close to the mall when its pouring down rain and you forgot your umbrella or like standing behind someway in the express lane at the grocery store whose supposed to have only 8 items, but instead has 13, and you know because you've counted everyone.
Medium things can get us angry. Like getting picked on in middle school because you're not wearing clothes from the Gap or from Limited Too. Or like cooking a nice hot dinner for your family and having nobody come to the table the first time you call them. And when they finally do show up everything's cold. Or like rearranging your whole life so you can be home when the repairman comes to fix that broken dishwasher only to discover that he never shows up, never calls, nothing.
Big things can get us angry. Like having parents who just seem to fight all the time and you can't stand it anymore or like a having a dad whose an alcoholic or a workaholic or some other kind of holic that keeps him from spending any time with you. Or like having your best friend killed in a car accident by a drunk driver, gone in an instant, or like discovering your teenage son is doing drugs or like hearing the doctor tell you that the biopsy came back malignant.
All of us deal with anger at various levels, all the time. And how we handle our anger has a lot to do with whether our life works well. Those of you who suffer from allergies will appreciate how one person described anger as "an allergic reaction to a little piece of life's pollen blown our way." Those little pieces of pollen can make our eyes water and our face turn red and our heart race and just downright irritate us. Just like anger. And often we have no control over when and where that pollen hits us. Some of us came to Valley View today ... angry.
There's a lot about anger we know about and there's a whole lot about anger we don't know anything about. Why do some people have long fuses and others have short fuses and some have no fuses at all? Why do some people get angry over the slightest irritation while others have major calamities and don't get angry at all? Why do some people turn their anger inward on themselves and others throw it up on everybody else? One psychologist I read this week said, "When you begin to learn anything about anger, you learn how mysterious and complex it really is." Experts are telling us now that anger is not a primary emotion. It's a secondary emotion. It kicks in after we first feel something else like hurt or embarrassment, frustration or rejection. The most common trigger of anger is when we don't get our own way. When our plans get thwarted.
One night this week as we were driving home from swimming at the YMCA, our 3 ½ year old daughter Avery asked if we could listen to her favorite Amy Grant song on the CD called "I Have Decided." And I said, "No, we can't." Now before you think I'm a heartless, cruel, ogre of a Father, you need to know that we had already listened to "I Have Decided" about 18 times on the way over to the Y. And so I said, "No, Avery, Daddy wants to listen to another song!" And she said, "Okay, Dad, that's fine, you're the Father and you should have the chance to listen to anything you want." No, she didn't say that at all. Instead she went, "WHHHHHH!" She got angry. She didn't get her own way. And for a moment I thought about giving in and listening to "I Have Decided" for the 19th time and then I thought about last week's teaching, set limits for you kids. And I took heart and dug my heels and listened to the song I wanted. And in a few minutes she was fine. She had expressed her anger and worked through it. And then we listened to "I Have Decided." Avery's plans got thwarted and she got angry.
Anger, as an emotion, is neither good or bad. It's not sinful to be angry. Anger is a God given emotion. It's part of being created in the image of God who sometimes gets angry himself. In Psalm95:10 we read that God was angry with his people. For forty years I was angry with that generation. I said, "They are a people whose hearts go astray." God had a mad on for 40 years with Israel. God understands anger.
Jesus got angry. In John 2, when Jesus saw that the Temple had been turned into a flea market he got ticked. John 2:15 says, Jesus made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!" Jesus understands anger.
Anger is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, sometimes it can energize us to do the right thing. But how we handle anger is the ball game. It'll determine whether or not our life works well.
When it comes to handling anger most of us fall into one of two camps, stuffers or spewers. And both can be lethal. Stuffers handle the hurts and disappointments and letdowns in life by denying that they're really angry at all. When they get angry their jaw tightens and they get quiet. They withdraw and pull away and say, "Nothings wrong." They shove their anger into the basement of their lives and lock the door and pride themselves by saying, " I never get angry." What they mean by that is that they never blow up. But they get angry, they just push their anger down. They figure out of sight, out of mind. I know that because I'm a stuffer, that's my anger default mechanism.
But the trouble with stuffers is that the anger doesn't go away. Burying our anger is like burying canisters of toxic waste. You can put the stuff underground and everybody thinks the problem is gone until months or even years later when people start having serious health problems because the toxic waste has leaked out of the canisters. And now it's contaminated everything and it's in the drinking water and people are getting sick all over the place. Stuffed anger is like that. It always, always leaks. It leaks into our lives sometimes causing us to be depressed. Depression is anger turned inward that's leaking. It leaks into our relationships and poisons them. It can leak into our attitudes making us irritable and bitter and cynical. It leaks into our bodies with things like headaches and ulcers and stomach problems and eating disorders and sleep disorders. Buried anger eventually breaks apart, leaks out and poisons the water table of our life. It's not God's way of managing anger.
Spewers take the opposite approach. When they get angry they just let it fly. They cut loose, curse God, yell at people, slam doors, kick little dogs. They rage all over everybody. They make somebody else pay. And usually they don't take the time to figure it out. So they repeat the same cycle of anger to rage over and over again. Like Proverbs 19:19 says, The hot-tempered must pay the penalty; rescue them and you will have to do it again.
There was a time when some counselors were encouraging their clients to express their rage by beating on pillows and punching things and swinging bats. But studies have shown that blowing off steam, even in the safety of a counselor's office, is not the best way to handle anger. Because rage breeds more rage. Temper tantrums only increase our anger, they don't reduce it. And people who vomit their anger all over others do a lot of damage to their family and to their friends and to themselves. Which is why Proverbs says don't hang out with rage filled people.
Proverbs 22:24-25 says, Do not make friends with the hot-tempered, do not associate with those who are easily angered, 25 or you may learn their ways and get yourself ensared. Steer clear of ragaholics.
So if stuffing our anger isn't the way to manage it. And if spewing our anger isn't the way to handle it. How do we deal with it? How do we express it constructively? Let me give you four ways right from the time-tested wisdom of Proverbs. Four God given ways on how to manage our anger.
First, don't sweat the small stuff. We got to know what to get angry about and what ignore. That's not the same as stuffing our anger. Instead, it's deciding what to pursue and what to let go of. Proverbs 17:14 says, Starting a quarrel is like breaching a dam; so drop the matter before a dispute breaks out. Proverbs 19:11, A person's wisdom yields patience. It is to one's glory to overlook an offense.
In God's eyes, it's to our credit to overlook certain wrongs. Not every wrong. Some we need to confront. Which is why we need discernment to know what's the big stuff and what's the small stuff. Because the big stuff for you may be small stuff for me and the big stuff for me may be small stuff for you.
Parents we gotta know what's worth doing battle over with our kids. Things like clothes and music and hairstyles and tattoos and piercings and friends and dating and movies and television and curfews and the use of the phone and the Internet ... What are we going to make a big deal about? We gotta know what's worth doing battle over. Because we can choose to win the battle but completely lose the war with our children. That takes God given wisdom.
I love what the ancient philosopher Aristotle said on this one. He said, "Anybody can get angry. That's easy. But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that isn't within everybody's power and that isn't easy." Don't sweat the small stuff. And if we don't know what the small stuff is, we need to ask God to show us the difference between the small stuff and the big stuff.
Second, bite your tongue. So often the part of our body that gets us into trouble when we're angry is our tongue. There's a time to speak and there's a time to shut up. And usually when we're angry the time to speak comes after we've taken a chunk out of our tongue.
Proverbs 12:18 says, Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. The things we say in the heat of our anger can do major damage that's difficult if not impossible to repair. There's an old Chinese Proverb that says, "If you're patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."
I read about a little boy who had trouble with his temper. So his father gave him a big bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he had to hammer a nail into the back of the wooden fence that ran behind their house. The first day, the boy drove 37 nails into the fence. But over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails he drove was less and less. He learned that it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence. Until finally one day the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He was so happy that he told his dad and his dad was happy too. And then he told his son to go back out to the fence and pull out one nail for every day that he was able to hold his temper. The days passed until the boy was finally able to tell his dad that all the nails were gone. Then his father took him by the hand and led him to the fence and said, "You did great, son. But look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a mark, just like those nails. And no matter how many times you say you're sorry the mark will always be there."
Thomas Jefferson used to say, "When you're angry, count to 10 before you speak. If you're really angry, count to 100." Mark Twain who didn't have quite as much patience put it this way, "When you're angry, count to 4. When you're really angry, swear." I'm not advocating that. But we gotta control our tongues.
This is where stuffers have an advantage over spewers. They're pretty good at biting their tongue. Jennifer knows when I get angry I withdraw. I just shut down. I'll go out into the garage and start some ambitious project, banging things around or I'll go into kind of a whistling mode. I can bite my tongue pretty good, but I can also say nothing about my anger and that's not good.
So third, talk about your anger. This is how counselors make such a good living. They get paid $120 an hour to provide a safe place for people to talk about their anger. But we can save ourselves a ton of money if we learn to talk about our anger to each other. The body of Christ was designed for that. That's part of what it means to live in community.
Proverbs 27:4-6 says, Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy? 5 Better is open rebuke than hidden love. 6 Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.
When we're angry we need to talk about it. This is where spewers have an advantage, because they do talk. But we need to talk about our anger in the right way. Not, "You make me so mad when you ..." or "I can't believe you did that, you're so ..." That's not the way to talk about our anger. There's another approach that demands Holy Spirit led self-control.
Some call it the XYZ approach. In other words, when you did X in situation Y, I felt Z. For example, when you came to the dinner table late after I called you three times I felt angry about that. Or when you told John and Susan at the party on Saturday night that I didn't know anything about fixing things around the house, I felt embarrassed and that made me angry. Saying "I feel angry" rather than "you make me angry" keeps the discussion from sounding like an attack. And if you're talking about it to a friend or your spouse or your kids those are the kinds of wounds that can produce healing Proverbs 27:6 says.
This is where my learning curve is right now, because I grew up in a home where emotions just weren't shared. The other night Jennifer and I went out on a date. The kids were staying overnight at someone's house so we could have peace and quiet. But we got a late start because of a schedule conflict so I was a little upset about that. But then we had a good time bowling together of all things. On the way home we stopped at Blockbuster to pick up a movie and looked for easily a half-hour and to be honest couldn't find anything that we wanted to invest two hours in watching. So we walked out empty handed and I was a little bummed about that. Then we got home and there was a message on our machine that Avery was coughing and couldn't get to sleep. So we decided to drive to the baby sitters and pick Avery up and bring her home and had to be parents again and now I was angry. My plans were thwarted. The night didn't go like I had hoped. And it was a big step for me to say, "Jennifer, I'm angry. Not at you. Not at Avery. But at the situation. I was really looking forward to tonight and it just didn't happen the way I hoped."
In my bumbling way I think that's what it means to talk about our anger. My "MO" would have been to stuff it and keep it inside and have Jennifer think I was angry at her or at the baby sitter or at Avery. All kinds of things can be read into silence. Talk about your anger. Speak the truth in love.
And finally, forgive, don't fight back. When we're hurt by some one it's so easy to want to even the score. But that's God's job, not ours. Proverbs 20:22 says, Do not say, "I'll pay you back for this wrong!" Wait for the Lord, and he will deliver you."
Again, that's a Holy Spirit thing, asking for his help to forgive someone who's hurt us. Forgiveness is surrendering my right to hurt you back if you hurt me. Forgiveness is the water that puts out the fire of anger. In Matthew 18, when Jesus was asked by his disciples whether they should forgive someone up to seven times? He said, "What are you talking about, seven times? I tell you, seventy times seven. There is no cap on forgiveness."
And if we're going to build those strong families we talked about last week and sustain those long friendships we've talked about as well, there's got to be truckloads of forgiveness given to our spouses and our kids and our parents and our siblings and our friends. God's well of forgiveness never runs dry. I'll close with this.
The story's told of Leonardo da Vinci, the brilliant artist, who was working on his famous painting "The Last Supper" when he got angry with a certain man. In fact, at one point he was so angry that he lost his temper and lashed out at the fellow with some very bitter words. Later on when he returned to the canvas to continue painting he tried to work on the face of Jesus. But he was so upset that he just couldn't pull it together to do that. So finally he put down his brush and went out to find the man he had blasted and asked his forgiveness. The man accepted his apology and da Vinci was able to go back to his studio and finish painting the face of Jesus.
If we spend time with Jesus with any regularity at all and if we're open to the Spirit of God we can't stay angry very long, we just can't and we can't withhold forgiveness very long either. Because that's the direction he always wants to move us.
So what's the next step God wants you to take? Is it to let something go? Is it to bite your tongue or maybe talk about your anger? Is it to forgive someone? Remember, God stands ready to help you if you invite him to.