Are you eaten up with anger?

Anger seldom shows up these days.

At least the good kind.

The good kind of anger enables hope to flourish, because it can remove the scales from our eyes so that we can see the things that are wrong with the world. And that kind of anger is the first step toward finding the courage to set things right. It is an anger that exists for the sake of wholeness and health.

I would love to see that kind of anger alive in the world, and in myself.

But too often I bump into another kind of anger, the anger that exists not to set things right. It lives solely for itself. It cares nothing about justice or setting things right. It is an all-consuming anger that chokes the possibility of hope. That kind of anger explodes, but rather than creating energy for change, it leaves nothing but destruction.

I hate seeing that kind of anger in the world, and in myself.

But it shows up everywhere I turn.

I see it seizing presidential candidates who try to outdo one another in showing anger.

I hear it in the words of parents about their children and children about their parents.

That bad kind of anger stands impatiently in the coffee lines at Panera Bread, drives aggressively on the road, spews out as unending complaint in our classrooms and sanctuaries and offices, and wherever it shows up, it comes to destroy.

My moments of such unrighteous anger convince me that what Fred Buechner once wrote is true:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Isn’t it time to push away from the feast which anger has prepared?