anger

Sometimes a single theme seems to dominate a day.

Today's been a bit like that. And the theme has been anger.

Appropriately enough, the weather down south has been making the headlines again. It's a sort of 'anger' thing way out there in the winds and seas and clouds.

The meteorologists have been describing the storms that are hitting the country these days as an 'explosive cyclogenesis', or in more down to earth language, a 'weather bomb'.

Anger is that sort of system transferred onto the globe of our lives. A fiercely destructive thing.

Much of my day has been spent with a series of different people. Lengthy, painful sessions, exploring the hurts and slowly trying to fashion out a future which will give the person hope.

The morning was largely filled with that. (Once I'd made the soup, of course!)

What do you do with the anger you feel? When that anger's been building for years, when that anger's the fruit of a thousand different hurts? It's a huge, big 'low' of energy and if the thing is all held in, then one day it'll simply be volcanic in the way that it destroys the angry person from within.

There aren't any 'magic' solutions. "Let's just pray about it" may sound good and pious, but it doesn't really help. I mean I do pray with and for the folk, and I do so with expectancy and hope.

But faith without action is dead. And the exercise of faith involves us somehow trying to figure out just what the God-directed action is to be. And that takes time, commitment, care.

The bulk of the morning, as I say, was really involved in that sort of faith-ful exercise. It meant a few phone calls, fixing appointments, agreeing to go with the person and meet with someone else as the next step forward.

Anger doesn't vanish just because you pray it will. Not usually, anyway. I guess it'd be fine if it did.

Meeting with someone else in the early afternoon, it was 'anger' again which came up. As a topic of conversation, as it were, rather than anything else. The man I was seeing was struggling to know how best he could help a friend he has who is filled, he declared, with rage.

Anger. Like the 'explosive cyclogenesis' of the weather bomb, the thing is really destructive. It's certainly destroying this person as well. And what to do, and how to help - the guy I was seeing just hadn't a clue how best to hep his friend. He only knew that something, somehow, somewhere must done.

Faith - and some action as well.

And the man with whom I spoke has issues like that too.

He's a leader in Christ's church. Elsewhere. And not long back, an anger in the man exploded too.

I suspect that the anger he felt had been building for quite a while. And I also think that what he said in that sudden, really rather out-of-character, angry outburst which there was - I think it maybe needed to be said: the folk to whom he spoke, I think his angry words were maybe nothing less than God's own word to them.

But still ... it was in anger that he spoke. And that has repercussions, too.

It struck me that this incident was really quite like Moses when he lost the plot and lost the rag and kind of lashed out in his fury at the Israelites.

I think that what he did was probably something Israel had to see. The man's exasperation at their lack of trust was surely quite like God's. Except that Moses lost his cool.

And lost, as well, his ticket to the promised land. It was really quite tough on the guy.

He led them through these many years and brought them to the borders of the promised land, the threshhold of a whole new world. But that's as far as the man himself could go.

I felt for the man I was speaking with. That's maybe how his leadership will end as well.

A long and faithful leading of his people, but all he'll do is bring them to the borders of a brighter, better world.

And later at night, when the leaders here met, I started to think that that's perhaps the way it'll be for me as well!

In hindsight I wondered if the passage that I read in opening up the meeting for us all was maybe more prophetic than I thought.

Deuteronomy 31 - Moses went out and spoke these words to all Israel - "I am now a hundred and twenty years old and I am no longer able to lead you. The Lord has said to me, 'You shall not cross the Jordan' ..."

'I'm getting on in years. I'm really getting past it now. And I'm not going to get to see you where I'd set my heart on taking you.'

That's the sort of drift of what he said. And that's how I began to feel when the meeting was over and done.

But then, I was probably tired! Not thinking all that straight. Not seeing things as I maybe should.