Taming the Red Eyed Dragon

I believe that as human beings we are hard-wired with some fundamental emotions. These rudimentary feelings tend to be very black and white. One of the most powerful of these emotions is fear. Fear is a primal emotion. It is part of our survival mechanism, which allows us to make decisions very quickly. Our fight or flight response is triggered by fear.

Fear is a natural part of life. There is nothing wrong with the self-preserving kind of fear. It is rational and normal and healthy.

Everyone has had that experience where your mother told you not to touch the stove but you did it anyway. This experience allowed you to developed a respect for the stove, based on a situation that causes pain. We’ve all learned that it’s a bad idea to walk out into the street without looking both ways, because we have a fundamental fear of getting run over by a car. So self-preserving fear is rational and healthy and absolutely useful as a survival mechanism.

However, other fears are irrational.

For example my daughter is deathly afraid of spiders. They freak her out and she wants them dead, Dead, DEAD! In the 20+ years of our relationship I have learned special timber of the “There’s a spider in the shower scream”. I don’t have this aversion to arachnids so I have no problem dealing out death upon them. This is an irrational fear that can be managed but is not logical. She is also afraid of clowns but that doesn’t give me the right to swat them with a shoe.

There is another kind of fear.

Proverbs 9:10 says,

“Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”.

In this instance the fear of the Lord comes from a feeling of reverence. It is more about respect and honor than what we normally think of as self-preserving or irrational fear. To the Jewish mind (like the writer of proverbs) God was all-powerful and deserved this reverent fear. Our modern culture has lost this concept of reverential fear, this ultimate respect for the power and authority of God.

So fear can be self-preserving or it can be just plain terrifying or it can be reverent; but fear has an ugly cousin. Anger.

Anger is the Red Eyed Dragon.

Unlike fear, anger is not a hardwired emotional response. Anger is a decision that comes from a reaction to a feeling like fear or pain. Because it is a decision, we have the ability to choose how we respond, either positively or negatively. Also because anger is a response to a feeling, it doesn’t have to be a knee jerk reaction to a negative emotion. Let’s look at it another way…

I love rock climbing, heights don’t bother me, and so ladders and such don’t freak me out. Please understand, I do have a healthy respect for falling. But every climber knows it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s that sudden stop at the bottom. So walking out to the edge of a 12-story building without a harness always gives me the willies. But if you buckle me into a climbing rig and tell me to step off the edge, I can with little or no hesitation.

Fear is an emotional response to danger in the environment. I’ve heard it said that courage is not a lack of fear but the ability to overcome your fear.I can’t help being afraid, but I don’t have to let it control me. I can choose how to respond, I either succumb to the fear or I work to overcome it.

For example, I have no problem repelling down the face of a 200-foot cliff because I have learned from experience that I can trust my gear to keep me safe. I have overcome this fear. You could not get my wife to do this for a million dollars. Diane does not have this level of trust. Our response to the same situation is completely different.

We have the same kind of process in place when it comes to Anger. We can decide how to respond to it and control whether we get angry or to what degree. Rage is what happens when we decide not to control our anger but let it get out of control. Rage in our society is unusual. So this ability to control our response to situations that makes us angry is normal. It is also something that can be learned and managed and controlled.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to successfully manage my anger fairly well. To the point that most people who know me think I don’t get angry. Oh, I get angry. But I have learned that emotionally responding to my situation when I’m in this state is usually destructive and almost always counter productive. So for me, displaying my anger is usually not worth the fall out.

However, there are times when getting angry has its benefits. For example, once upon a time I had a coworker who was a controlling millennial female and a bully. I don’t like bullies. She decided early on in our relationship that I was a push over because I did not respond to her aggressive behavior the way she expected. This went on for several weeks. I talked with my boss and he told me that we needed to work this out on our own. L

So one day I decided that enough was enough. She said something snarky to me and I responded with a measured amount of righteous indignation. I helped her understand that I was completely capable of doing my job without her unnecessary supervision, but if there were things that I was doing that displeased her we could discuss them like adults. This was the beginning of us having a better relationship and the catalyst for this change was an appropriately measured use of anger.

Here’s the thing, getting angry is NOT a sin. Jesus got angry. On many occasions He displayed righteous indignation toward the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and in each of the gospels there is a description of him cleansing the temple. (Matthew 21:12–13, Mark 11:12, Luke 19:45–46, John 2:13–17)

John’s account is the most descriptive.

In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the moneylenders and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! My house will be called a house of prayer but you are making it a den of thieves!”

Obviously Jesus got angry and he acted on his anger. So let’s not fall into the trap that says getting angry is sinful. I can say that I have never braided a cord into a whip and used it to clear a room. This image does fly against our conception of gentle Jesus meek and mild. But on the other hand, being the personification of God incarnate with all the power of the universe at His disposal, I think you could also say that He demonstrated an enormous amount of restraint.

So getting angry in and of itself is not sinful.

In Ephesians 4:26-27 Paul says.

In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

There are three interesting statements in this scripture.

Notice the presupposition, Paul is expecting that we are going to get angry, but he says when you do; don’t let it cause you to sin. Anger becomes sin when someone gets hurt. Getting angry without causing pain takes wisdom and restraint.

We may not have control of our environment but we always have control of how we respond to our environment. The same goes for our feelings. Some feelings like fear are a hard-wired response to danger and we can’t control that, but we always have control of how we respond. This is where wisdom and restraint come in, because our response will be either a conscious decision or a knee jerk reaction. If you allow yourself to follow the reaction you will almost always be disappointed in the outcome. So take a breath and make a choice.

The second part of this scripture is something that my wife and I have practiced for a long time. We decided early on in our marriage to never go to bed angry. No matter what, we would talk it out and work through the problem. Here’s why.

When you leave anger alone and don’t deal with it appropriately. It will fester and become something much worse, like resentment, which leads to disdain, and is a short hop away from hate. How many relationships could be saved every year if people would simply follow this simple advice. Paul absolutely got it right.

The last part of this scripture is interesting. When you allow anger to go unresolved in your life, it gives the devil a chance to stick his foot in the door and build a stronghold. Once this stronghold is in place he will use it to devour your life and destroy your relationships.

Anger is the Red Eyed Dragon. It is a corrosive poison that will dissolve the very foundations of your existence. But this beast can be tamed; to do so takes wisdom, courage and restraint.

In Matthew 7:13-14 Jesus said,

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

It is easy to get angry; it’s hard show compassion in the face of something that makes you angry. As Christians we are called to choose the harder road. Not because it is hard but because it’s the better path.

<>< AMEN ><>