Some things I've been learning lately:
I have to be careful not to tuck the ends of my hair into my skirt along with my shirt. I felt something slide across my hip in the shower and whirled around in alarm. "Hey, hey, none of that," I sternly admonished my hair. My hair has definitely reached a New Frontier. I chalk it up to all the otherwise pointless prenatals I've taken.
Anger does not diminish God. This feels like a bold thing to say. I continue, at least a part of me continues, to be angry at God, in a smoldering, white hot, defiant way.
And what happens when someone defies God indefinitely? That's right: they get the lightning bold of His Righteous Wrath. Hell, even if they're His Best Dude, like Job, you can get utterly smashed. You just never know. But ratchet up the ante with defiant, personal anger? Risky behavior with God, I couldn't help but believe.
So that kind of put me in a tight spot. Here was part of me who wouldn't let go of my anger at God. Here's a whole other part of me that terrified of the Wrath Of God. And here's another part of me that has faith in a loving, merciful, redemptive God and believes that God understands the anger and will work with it.
I was ok for a while with the anger, but apparently I had an unwritten "proper length of anger at God" measurement and I was exceeding it. So that measuring part of me was all like, "No, really, you're gonna have to reel it in now. Seriously. You have to be done now."
It's very uncomfortable being me sometimes.
So, I was having this interesting conversation with my father, during which my father suggested I must be serving a very small god, if my anger was somehow threatening to him.
I thought, gosh that makes sense. "So what you're saying is, anger glorifies God?" I asked.
Now there's a potentially heretical statement if ever I wrote one. But I think, in the heart of me, that it is true. How is it that those songs sometimes go; "God, I lift you up, I glorify You..."? Well, what could be higher up than beyond the reach of even my greatest anger, my deepest disappointment? If I release those to God and at the same time say, "I know you are so much greater than this, so much larger, so much deeper. You surround the anger as you surround me."
Dad also mentioned that in talking about anger, one is also going to be, quite naturally, talking about power. Because anger and power go hand in hand. And if I'm angry at God, then I've taken on power for myself. And Dad suggested that God is so powerful Himself that He isn't threatened when I behave toward Him in power myself. In fact, to act in power, even powerful anger, is also to glorify Him.
Why? Because we're made in His image. We are a little, imperfect reflection of Him. So my power reflects unto His greater power, to His greater glory and not to His detriment. When that clicked, then I realized that I had been worshiping a very small false god indeed, one who was threatened if I empowered myself toward him in anger and would seek to wipe me out and cut me down to size just to show me what's what. And I don't want to worship a false god. It's so much more satisfying to be in relationship to the True God.
Then, dear readers, I read this in M. Scott Peck's "The Road Less Travelled."
"It is one thing to believe in a nice old God (or a crabby, mean God, in my case) who will take good care of us from a lofty position of power which we ourselves could never begin to attain. It is quite another to believe in a God who has in mind for us precisely that we should attain His position, His power, His wisdom, His identity."
So, I continue unabated angry at the True God. I really am. I don't know how it will be resolved ultimately, but I'm rather curious to find out.
