Tuesday night, chy’all, our baby was like “if you think I’m about to sleep right now…”
I drove that child around the mountain range where we live for almost an hour. She sang Elmo, pointed out mountains, and whenever she was close to the edge of slumber, she’d shout, “MOMMY!!!!” I got her back to the house and laid with her until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then, Cody tapped in around nine.
By that point my nerves were shot and my energy was like girl if you don’t let me outta here, I’m gonna seep down into your bones until I come out sideways in all the ways you hate. What was I supposed to do that late? Nine pm in the desert is not the time to go for a walk and even though my energy was pent up, a workout sounded like a choice only people with abs make. So, I found a recipe for Hot Honey Chicken and started chopping, egging, breading, and slathering with spicy butter until I felt the blood returning to my brain.
The recipe made me think of Bojangles cajun chicken biscuits. I ate there all the time after the club in my late teens and early twenties. Fast food or the Waffle House is good at 3 am because nobody cares what you look like, if you slur when you order, or who you dragged in there with you. Ain’t my business ma’am, what would you like to eat? is the general vibe.
Maybe I wasn’t just craving comfort chicken but also the judgment free zone.
Cause I’d worked all day and then spent the evening trying to get my baby to sleep with not one minute to myself. That kind of thing sometimes makes me mad. But you’re not supposed to be mad at toddlers.
(Listen, there’s a reason Go the f**k to sleep is a baby shower gift. Parents are joking but they are also issuing warnings.)
Next night, I was minding my business, parking at the Trader Joe’s when I saw a woman and her teenage daughter standing uneasy next to a random white car. When I checked on them, she told me the lady in the car had KEYED HER BRAND NEW LEXUS while she went into the Best Buy. Why did someone so clearly close to 70 do this? Because the woman had honked her horn to let somebody’s grandma know she was about to cause a car crash.
Instead of saying thank you and letting that go, grandma strategically circled back, parked two cars down, got out to key the car, then found a new spot, and went grocery shopping like it ain’t not thang but a chicken wang. Lucky for the other woman and her daughter, Best Buy got the whole thing on video. So, by the time we talked, she was just waiting for the cops to come. I offered to stay and talk and be present with her and her daughter. She shared some of her story which had me in tears because when we make rash and stupid decisions that impact people, we have no idea what they’re going through.
In 2022, nobody needs you to make their life worse with your judgment or your foolishness.
Her husband and the cops came so I got my groceries and went home. I also cried while I shopped and that made me miss Manhattan, where you can sob on subways and no one thinks that’s abnormal. I cried for the grandma in the car who might have gone to jail because she’d never learned to deal with her anger. I get that - my snap decisions to lash out have been my worst. I cried for the woman in the parking lot, her daughter and their current reality. I cried because we’re all freaking losing it. (Seriously, people are getting more cruel and crazy, right? It’s not just me?) I cried because I’ve taught myself to pay attention.
King Solomon wrote, “The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief. To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.1”
The older I get, the truer this is. As we say often in this neighborhood, proximity is power. The closer you get to God, the more permanent hope becomes. The closer you get to yourself, the more aware you are of brokenness. The closer you get to people, the more understanding God gives you.
If there’s trust, there’s stories. Stories give us great hope and great grief.
Don’t get me wrong, I miss a lot. I’m not trying to sound pretentious or precious about paying attention. If you have a birthday, do not expect me to remember it. Were you hoping I would text you back in a reasonable fashion? I am incapable. Did you email my personal email six months ago? I never knew it. But if you are going through some kind of hell or you are in need of mercy or you find yourself standing in the parking lot trying to get the woman who keyed your car to stay, I’ll probably see you.
Because life is absurd and we need each other.
I preached on Matthew 5:21-26 at my local church Sunday. We’re walking through Matthew 5 bit by bit weekly. I got the passage where Jesus starts to unpack six commandments with this killer opener: “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you…” Just like they do today, clergy leaders had a tendency to shrink God’s commandments or expand them in favor of their own agendas and bad interpretations of scripture. Plus, since the dawn of time, humans have struggled to get a hold of themselves and their anger so he’s offering practical help.
In that handful of verses, he talks about anger and reconciliation and child, let me tell you, this is the message I needed twenty years ago when I would get out of my car to cuss you out at a stoplight. My anger was justified but I didn’t know that so instead I was filled with shame.
Nice girls don’t get angry. Classy southern girls never break face. Christians are too busy being blessed to be stressed. Allegedly.
So I’d hide it and hold it and suppress it until it came out in self-harm and bad relationships and addiction and I wrongly assumed I didn’t have an anger problem. Ten years into my recovery journey, I learned just how angry I actually was and started seeing red everywhere. It’s taken me a long time to come back to center.
The truth is, anger is a natural passion. We can’t escape it but we can learn what to do with it. There are times when anger is right, appropriate, even commendable. So what Jesus does in this passage is help bad spiritual leaders understand that murder is not the only thing God will hold us accountable for - hatred is murder inside the heart and their hypocritical behinds would also get God’s judgment if they didn’t get honest real quick. He’s also helping regular people understand this: Anger is normal. But if you don’t deal with it, it will deal with you.
There’s a greek word he uses alongside anger, eike, which signifies, sine causâ, sine effectu, et sine modo—without cause, without any good effect, without moderation2.
I’ve observed that people are often angry without cause.
People are angry at others because of their religion and beliefs, their politics, their ethnicity or citizenship, their lifestyle and choices.
People are angry at themselves or some person in their past who lives inside their mind, still directing their lives, and project that anger onto others without cause.
People are angry at people they don’t even know. Politicians, influencers, pastors, presidents, pundits… is some of it warranted? I don’t know, maybe??
People are also angry without any good effect, without moderation. We know family members like this. We’ve dated or married people like this. We’ve seen people preach forgiveness and live with hatred in their hearts. We’ve hurt ourselves to avoid getting mad at someone who deserve it. We’ve certainly found ourselves in the comments sections shaking our heads telling God that Earth is now becoming uninhabitable.
I don’t want anger to mark us. Do we really want to be neighbors who spend our spiritual energy mad at people we don’t even know? Or keying cars in parking lots? Or suppressing our anger until it comes out sideways on the freeway or through self-harm or inner turmoil because of conflict avoidance or screaming at toddlers to go to sleep?
Angry without cause, with no good effect, without moderation. At ourselves. At God. At others. It doesn’t have to be this way.
We can deal with our crap and learn to listen to gentleness and not the perfectionist taskmaster living inside our heads. We can channel our justified anger into collective action. Love is the thing that marks us.
You are more powerful than you know; together, even more so. We are the healers and bridge builders and truth tellers. We can help each other in the absurdity of life because we are a force for good.
Next week, we’ll talk about what anger looks like - the passive and aggressive forms and how to become an assertive person who can channel it well. I have a chart! Get excited! Tell your friends!
It’s a pleasure to journey with you. Thank you for your presence - I don’t take it lightly and I feel honored to have you here. If you haven’t introduced yourself, please do so right here! If you’ve been around a while and love it here, consider supporting this work by becoming a paid subscriber for $7 a month or $50 a year. Grateful for you and sending you love, after hours.
https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-18.htm
https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/matthew-henry/Matt.5.21-Matt.5.26