GRIEF AND ANGER
I want to quote some more from the book The Emotionally Healthy Church (by Peter Scazzero), and remind us all to think about paying attention to pain. On page 161 he says, "Year after year we deny and avoid the difficulties and losses of life, the rejections and frustrations. People in our churches minimize their failures and disappointments. The result is that for many today, at least in prosperous North America, there is a widespread inability to face pain. This has led to an overall feeling of superficiality and a lack of profound compassion."
He goes on to talk about how we then loose our capacity to grieve. I'm in a hard situation right now that I was talking over with my pastor the other day. I told him that I was grieving. And he said that he thought (and I wanted his help) I was acting more in sinful anger than in grief. He helped me by saying that, he's not sure this is totally right, but he thinks that the sinful anger he's talking about feels the situation and wants to retaliate, while grief feels the situation and has compassion on the other more than a desire for retaliation. What do you think?
posted by Ann Louise @ 8/14/2007 06:10:00 PM
2 Comments:
Personally, I would think that whenever we are placed into a hard situation, we can often feel grief AND anger - both of which are neutral if not good terms. To paraphrase from Gary Chapman's "The Other Side of Love" (a wonderful book that I highly recommend), anger is a trait given to us as people created in the image of God in order to seek out justice in an imperfect world. Now if that justice is based on mis-information, or a fallen sense of justice, then it can turn into sinful anger. But even then, it becomes a question of what do you do with it. If you retaliate, then it definitely becomes sinful. And it is progressive because now the other party has been treated unjustly and can rightly be angry themselves. But there are other options.
Look at the story of Cain (Gen. 4). God saw Cain's anger and didn't even identify it as sin (v.6), but he did make it clear that his anger was leading him into sin (v.7). So even if Cain's anger had been just (which it most likely wasn't), it was the outworking of that anger for which he was punished.
So I would say that grief and anger are both very possibly valid emotions. But the outworking of those emotions, if it doesn't lead you and/or the other party closer to the Lord, can be very sinful.
There's my two cents.
Great words, Jeff, thanks!
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