The room is on fire
release and reuse your anger
Last week, someone asked me how I wasn’t angry all the time. This question, for me, was specifically directed at the issue of women in the church. How am I not an angry person because of the things that I have experienced and the injustices that come up often (weekly?) in the news? But this question isn’t just about women in the church. It’s about racism. It’s about genocide. It’s about how we exclude the disabled. It’s about tyrants with mighty egos that wreak havoc on entire countries. It’s about people in power who think their power is for them instead of the good of others. It’s about being a person in such a broken world. You fill in the blank with the thing that consistently makes you angry. How are you going to not be an angry person?
It’s a good question that I brushed off with the true but simplistic answer: Jesus. But the question stayed with me because I feel like I’ve been mad my whole life. I’ve joked that I’m going to assemble a playlist of Taylor Swift’s “mad woman” songs.1 (If you don’t like TSwift, you don’t have to leave.) I’m an enneagram 8, located in the anger triad; when other people might get their feelings hurt and go cry, I just get angry.
Sometimes anger is appropriate. We can be angry and not sin.2 Anger is a very human emotion that we have to learn to express in the presence of God.3 But the anger has to become fuel for something else or be released in some way because we don’t get a pass on being angry people as followers of Jesus. We don’t want to become a person who is fundamentally angry anyway.4
I’ve been meditating on Galatians 5:13-26 and it’s the first passage that I thought of when I was thinking about my own anger. The fruit of the Spirit born of God’s work in our lives and our participation in it is antithetical to being an angry person at the core—though not from feeling anger at injustice or wrong.5
Over time, I’ve learned some things to do with my anger. Anger will not be ignored. It won’t get tired and leave if you refuse to name it. It won’t wear a nice disguise and masquerade for very long as something else. It’s like smoke. You see it and you need to start looking for the fire. It will seep out all the cracks and corners of your life into everyone and everything that you touch until finally it burst into flames. Anger needs our attention.
Be physical. If you can, and if you need to, give your anger an appropriate physical outlet. Stomp around for a while on an angry walk. Do some pushups. Chop wood? I don’t think this will redirect your anger in the long term on its own, but it will help immensely. We are embodied people and we should act like it.
Draw up close to Jesus. Don’t wait until you’re mad to do this. Get to know Jesus well and you’ll see that He experienced anger. The injustices that we see, He sees them now and experienced them when He was on earth. Look through His eyes in the Gospels. How did He react? How did He respond? What did He do with His feelings? This drawing close to Jesus will help you become so grounded in your identity in Christ that other people’s opinions and beliefs will not settle into your heart. It will be easier to release your anger and live from love when you practice this.
Turn anger into lament. The best way that I have found to deal with my anger is to lament about the things that make me angry. Often beneath my anger is sorrow and grief or fear; it just feels safer to be angry. Lament allows me to name those other feelings while not ignoring my anger. If I am justifiably angry about how myself or someone else has been treated, God is more angry. God mourns the things that have broken us and the systems that have mistreated people. I am not angry and trying to make God care. God is there with me in my pain and my hurt. I can grieve and mourn those losses and the injustices of life in front of God. I don’t have to hide. I don’t have to get it together. I don’t have to resolve it. I am waiting on God to come and bring justice with Him.
I highly recommend contemplative practices with the psalms to learn how to do this. We learn how to be human in the presence of God through the psalms and the psalmist spends a lot of time angry, asking God to do something, to fix it.
Embrace humility. Some wrong is done intentionally. But some wrong is done without knowledge or without a way of avoidance and even without thought.6 We will do wrong toward others despite not wanting to do so. Occasionally, we will do wrong to others and we will mean to do it.7 When we want Jesus to come and crush the wrongdoers, we rarely include ourselves in that category. But there we are along with the people with whom we are angry.
Pray more than anything else. When some thing hurts deeply, it’s easy to pull back away from God. I’ve discovered that the things that I am most angry and grieved about are the hardest parts of myself to bring before God. Why hasn’t He done something already? If He cared, He would—what if He doesn’t care? But I am relearning how to come, trusting that, in fact, God cares more about it than I do even if He’s not doing what I want. I want my anger to direct me to prayer.8 My ability to fix any of the things that I am regularly mad about is so limited as to almost not exist. It’s fog, a joke when people needed poetry. My anger needs to send me to God.
Build something different. The beginning step is to rage into the night. To hate how things work. To name the evil. Sometimes those things need to be done. Sometimes you have to leave and sometimes you have to say things out loud. But don’t stop there. Build something different. Let the anger become fuel for some work that does good in the world. But a caution: let God heal your heart first. If we do something in the name of Jesus that doesn’t look like Jesus we are part of the same evil that has hurt us. Let the work you build be shaped by your imagination of the kingdom of God. Let the work be led from love and a desire for shalom.
This is not a blanket prescription. This is how I have learned, so far, to release and reuse my anger, instead of letting it combust. Anger is consuming; it will devour me if I ignore it or nurture it. I want to feel anger when it is appropriate but I don’t want to be an angry person.
What have you learned about anger?
Mad Woman, Tolerate It, The Man, Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? You get the idea. Did you recognize the title of the post?
Ephesians 4:26.
Like all of our emotions.
Because God wants good for us; He’s not just spoiling our fun.
Never feeling anger is just as much a red flag as always feeling anger.
I’m reminded of a scene in The Good Place where they realize it’s hard to get a good enough score to go to the good place because in buying a tomato to eat healthy, someone who picks the food is being exploited.
Most ironically, this will probably happen when we are angry.
This is something I am practicing in my life currently and it is HARD.
I get angry at such little things and it always shocks me how quickly it can flare up. I appreciate your advice here! I often try to squash my anger down when all I feel like doing is throwing something. Prayer is always the best answer, isn't it? And maybe some exercise 😅 thanks for this!
I really, really needed to read this. I’m learning that I’m prone to anger (Enneagram 1 here, also in the anger triad) and you’re so right by the time you see smoke it’s too late. I always thought because mine wasn’t an explosive anger, it was okay, I could ignore it because it’s not a “nice” emotion. I’ll be returning to this one over and over. Thanks.