Random Musings

Occasionally you would bump into a daily spiritual passage that is so pertinent that it seems as if God were speaking directly to you, and I don’t believe that such occurrences are mere coincidences.

One passage I came across very recently was “Put A Lid On It” by Joe Stowell (here).

It dealt with the issue of anger and how we should learn to be slow to anger.

He draws the analogy with barbequing and says that “like barbequing, we have the ability, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to put a lid on our anger so that it can become a productive force in our lives. Anger does not have to rage untended in our souls until it scorches everything and everybody nearby.”

It’s funny how sometimes life puts you on both sides, such that you are able to see things from both perspectives and understand each side much better.

Just recently I had the experience of getting very angry with a friend, and I also had the experience of having another friend get angry with me.

Which then made me sit and think for a bit.

It made me evaluate if the way I conducted myself when I was angry with the first friend was justified and reasonable or not.

Conversely, it made me evaluate whether the things I did to make my other friend angry was bad enough that it warranted the person’s anger, and whether what I did to appease the person was sufficient enough.

That’s what I mean by life putting you on both sides…you get to see things both from the victim and the perpetrator’s point of view.

In a way, it helps you evaluate things much more clearly.

Between friends inevitably there will be conflicts.

Of course, I have a lot of friends whom I’ve never had conflicts with before, but then again, it might be because I haven’t interacted with them enough.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is definitely not the idiom I’m looking for right now, it’s more along the lines of “disagreements are part and parcel of relationships, and sometimes disagreements may not necessarily always be unhealthy”.

Sometimes – and I am very guilty of this – we tend to see things only from our own point of view and fail to try to understand the other party’s reasons, and we end up jumping to conclusions very quickly.

But I think the key thing in all this is how conflicts are resolved.

Of course, in our fit of anger we always want to think or do or say silly things, be it due to the fact that we feel that our friends are not showing us due courtesy, or that we feel that our friends happened to have had 放鸽子 on us.

I believe that if anger can be managed in a responsible manner, and if conflicts can be resolved in a matured manner between two grown adults, then all is well and good.

To quote from the Joe Stowell page:

“Unresolved anger is the root of many sins such as hatred, slander, and revenge. Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you areas of residual anger; then take the necessary steps to free yourself from that pitfall.”