Fear and Anger

This last Sunday we dealt with the topic of fear and anger and I have received some very interesting responses from people. So I ask you out there in cyber space…What are you afraid of? How do you deal with fear? What difference does faith make?

For me, one fear I had was vampires. When I was young I watched a vampire movie on TV – I got so scared that I put a homemade cross under my pillow. My Mom would find it and throw it out and then she said that I would go out and make a new one… other fears I had was not getting married before Jesus Christ would return(hey, stop laughing); dying before I saw 30; roller coasters.

Some people say they have no fears. That may be true on the outside but when they go to bed at night I think that they may have fears that they don’t publicly acknowledge.

Stuff like…Fear of bats, of pain either physical or emotional, of loss and grief, of violent crime and criminals. What about the fear of failure. That you will not succeed. Fear that you will not be able to provide for family. Fear of not being able to change. Fear that we will not able to meet a special someone. Fear of loosing those who are close to us. Fear of rejection, Not fitting in. Growing old. That we won’t ever be known.

Have you ever thought that our fears lead to anger? What gets you angry? Anger is an emotion that controls you and consumes you. Anger is a part of a lot of people’s journey and it becomes part of people’s spiritual journey as well. The thing about anger is that it can distort things. When you are trapped in the emotion of anger you sometimes don’t see things as they really are. Things just get fuzzy. There are subtleties to anger. In the midst of fuzziness and distortion, it is imperative that we hear truth. That we hear the voice of truth. Face it when we are in anger, it takes over and we cannot hear clearly. And when you are upset there are different ways of dealing with anger. Some people say release it … problem with that most of the time when we lash out, it is the people around that suffer and though we might feel better they are the ones left with the damage. While we are releasing this anger we are pushing those away that we care about the most. We lash out with our anger and then we are left feeling alone. Have you been to the place where you are filled with anger and lash out at somebody or a group of people then all of a sudden you feel alone?

Now, you feel that you can’t be around these people anymore or that you crossed a line and you cannot come back to them. Then the voices pop into your head and say “That is right, you cannot go back. They will not accept you.”

Now there another side of anger that happens inside of us. We start to nurse the anger that you feel. You start to listen to those voices that justify how you feel and that you have been offended and that you are right to feel this way and that you want justice. And you start letting this thing simmer and then bitterness comes in and it gives birth to decay that starts happening in our soul and we find ourselves alone. The sad thing about this is that we choose. We choose to distance our selves from people. From the hurts and the things that we have been wronged. We choose then to put ourselves into solitary confinement. We choose to be alone. We choose a painful existence.

Notice how both lead to isolation?

Some of us take our anger and project it onto GOD. Maybe that is your story. Why do you have so much angst? Why do we have all this anger in us? Have you ever retraced that? Is it broken relationships that you found yourself? And you asked “Is there a GOD why is this stuff happening to me?” Or maybe you would see stuff on the news or real life that is full of injustice and we ask…if there is a GOD how can this happen?

What are your thoughts?