Whose fault is is it anyway?
My wife Gail and I were taking a drive in rural Suffolk recently. Progress was lovely and smooth until a tractor got in front of us. Now it’s almost the stuff of legend in our family that yours truly and slow tractors don’t get on well. As usual it wasn’t long before I was remonstrating in an animated voice about the unfairness of tractors on a country road. At this point my wife raised a sardonic eyebrow (she’s good at those) and said in a slightly ironic tone (also good at those) “A tractor! In rural Suffolk! Who knew?”
One of the interesting points about that story (apart from me needing to control my frustration) was that at far as I was concerned the reason for my anger was the tractor. It didn’t occur to me that maybe I was to blame for my own anger and this got me thinking. How often do we blame other people for our anger rather than ourselves? Now don’t get me wrong, our anger is justified on occasions, but a lot of the time we get angry because someone else gets in the way of what we want. Another reason for anger is buried hurt and pain. Wounds from the past run very deep and situations or people that remind us of that pain can spark anger in the present. Often the wrong people end up being the targets of our rage because we haven’t dealt with the real person or situation that is causing the pain. Counterintuitive as it sounds often admitting our anger is the first step to real freedom, Owning our anger and admitting it can often be the first step out of the torture chamber because then we can start to deal with the cause of the anger.
Commenting on anger, the Bible says, “Be angry, but in your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger”. In the poem “Tam O’ Shanter” Robert Burns describes a woman at home waiting angrily for her husband to return and talks about her “Nursing her wrath to keep it warm”. We can all nurse anger and resentment. The trouble is that far from keeping us warm, it wears us down. Slow burning anger eventually burns us.
God in Jesus offers a way to deal with that anger. At the cross he took on not only our sins but the sins committed against us. The bible says that “by his wounds we are healed”. He offers to take on not only the burden of our guilt, but the burden of our resentment and anger as well. Why not turn to him and let him take yours?