Anger

Anger

Give me your anger, God, against what is evil, not against myself or the people I love and serve.

Don’t sin by letting anger gain control over you. Ephesians 4:26

Anger provides enormous energy. Righteous anger empowers leaders to conquer evil. Wrongful anger turns leaders against the persons they love and serve. Turned inward, it can induce severe depression.

YOU ARE slow to your anger, God. Mine too often and too easily erupts immediately when provocation hits, unleashing my sharp tongue or my vengeance. Sometimes it leaves slashing scars that never disappear from the souls of those I care about. Turned on myself, my anger leaves me depressed. I need your Spirit to keep it under control. Protect me from myself.

When my anger burns hot or explodes openly, make me sensitive to what is really happening. If I am just venting to relieve my own frustration and insecurity, help me deal with the underlying cause in me. Help me learn the heart habit of pausing to check with you when I feel anger rising.

Give me the motivating power of your righteous anger, and purge from me the petulant destruction of selfish anger or anger at myself. I want to express anger in a way that will motivate people to great accomplishment, not belittle them in order to make me feel better.

I have been yelled at, falsely accused, and demeaned. It made me feel less like you, God, and it discouraged me. I do not want to treat people that way. I want to build them up and inspire them. I want to remember that these people do not exist to absorb pain from me. I exist to absorb their pain for them and to help them be strong. Do not let my anger diminish them or me.

I do not want to deny or try to suppress my own anger or anyone else’s. By your grace, I want to know the anger, learn from it, and express it for good. I do not want to lose my temper and waste all that power. I want to focus the angry energy where it will accomplish something positive.

Lord, you know that anger will come sometimes, but I do not want to live or lead in anger. I want to live and lead in love. Some appropriate anger about people’s pain will properly grow out of your love at work in me. I want to inspire others, and be motivated myself, by noble passion for what is true, pure, lovely, and excellent in life. But I do not want any anger at all that results from defense of my wounded ego. If my ego is that vulnerable, I should not be leading anyway.

I invite your Spirit to show me how you see each event in my leadership. I want to see what you see and feel what you feel. If there is anger . . .

Give me your anger, God, against what is evil, not against myself or the people I love and serve.

Reflections

Every time anger explodes inside me, burning to be unleashed on the hapless person I am facing, I see myself ten years old, writhing on the ground, pounding my fists in the grass, crying and screaming. My team had just lost a game of pickup football, and my anger was totally out of control. My dad walked across the field to me and firmly reprimanded me for losing my temper.

“You lose your temper sometimes,” I impudently shot back.

There was a pause of awful silence during which I finally came to my childish senses and became frozen in fear. Dad spoke in a measured tone. “We are both wrong to waste our energy by losing our tempers. I will work at controlling mine if you will learn to control yours.”

In relief I nodded my unspoken assent.

My dad was a passionate leader. Passion is essential to great leadership, and anger is the ready passion of those who care intensely and expect much from themselves and others. Most leaders experience a great deal of anger, their own and others’. But releasing uncontrolled anger inevitably turns a person into a fool.

My dad’s anger was just as strong after that event as before, but he increasingly demonstrated to me and to others what it meant to use it rather than lose it. We kept the covenant we made with each other that afternoon.