When Anger Arrives as Grace

Asleep

My body moves in and out of dishes and babies and prepping meals, meals, meals. My ears catch snippets of news. More shootings, refugee resettlement act repealed, fires, ice melting.

I turn an ear, shake my head and return to wiping up the spilled food. Moments of alone time are filled with other lives, fiction and nonfiction. 

Nudge

There's an unsettlement in my chest. Why is the Lord poking around in my heart?
The Spirit prays within me.

Give her the grace to give a damn.

Give her the courage to believe that everything she does matters.

Gentle.

Compassionate.

Powerful.

Anger as Grace

I am awakened. Grief and injustice overlooked, it is inflamed in my gut, hips and back. It tells me to pay attention. What happens when I start paying attention for the first time in years? Anger can take the form of many things - blame, grief, fear - and if these were the only forms I'd be limited to confessions and petitions. And yet, the anger that moves me to prayers of intercession, active empathy and restoring order to sacred spaces is a gift.
I have found myself recently becoming more and more upset with the status-quo. Not the status-quo around me, but my status-quo. The Enneagram has been an incredible tool for me to recognize my blind spots and , in the grace of Jesus, move forward in new grace-filled ways of being. As a 9wing1 on the Enneagram, my natural self is prone to wanting comfort at all consts. Sloth is my root sin, always vying for neglect of personal growth, "Just getting through the day" has been my mantra since my first son was born. I read a quote recently from Joanna Gaines that said, "Life is never predictable. Life is never really manageable. If your mind-set is always, 'I'm just surviving,' it seems to me that would wind up being the mind-set for the rest of your life." This is it. My circumstances aren't changing. The anger rises up in me and says, wake up! Will you choose to see the grace in this and grow and change? Am I willing to let go of old habits hanging on for nostalgia and welcome new habits of noticing my life round me? And the ultimate Grace, Christ Jesus, who said yes in the garden of Gethsemane, sits on the floor with me while I throw my tantrums and wail, picks me up when I'm ready, and remains with me as I begin again and again. But I must begin. And I must remain. I am a child of the light. Those who walk in the Light have fellowship with each other (1 John 1). I cannot say that I walk in the light but forsake gathering together with other believers. Fellowship and the confessing of sins amongst believers has been without a doubt, a saving grace for me. Anger has shown me that I have an inflated sense of self (hello Ego!) and to lay down in the eternal current of Jesus' grace and His Bride.

When I think of Jesus cleansing the temple, I see a grace-filled anger. It's righteous. Balancing. And because it's Jesus, it's incarnational. God and man. Loving his children so to say no, enough.
To quote Keizer once again, "Perhaps every grace-filled expression of anger is in some ways incarnational and sacramental, an embodiment of God's loving and maternal desire to be with her children and to advocate on their behalf. Remember that the name for the Holy Spirit given in the New Testament, parakletos, is sometimes translated as 'Advocate.' And that 'Advocate,' is the antonym of 'adversary,' which is what the name Satan means. Likewise, the incarnation itself may be understood as a highly refined expression of the wrath of God, the force that cleaves the rocks, parts the waters, and ultimately breaches the barrier between the human and the divine. It is the thunder of Sinai subsumed in a baby's cry; the bread of life furiously hungry at our breasts; the Lord made visible in his holy temple and rearranging the furniture.

Confession

"Whenever I see televised footage of a mass demonstration in some foreign country, and sometimes even in our own country, I seldom marvel at the zeal of the demonstrators or ponder the justice of their cause. I do not ask myself why these people hate Americans so much or what they hope to accomplish by creating such a stir. More often than not, what impresses me most powerfully is the extreme bother of it all. I imagine myself in their shoes--except that I am still myself and still shod in the shoes of a comfortable middle-class American--and I can scarcely think of leaving my house, driving to the center of some sweltering dusty city, parking my car (of course I wouldn't have a car in most of these countries), milling about with a bunch of smelly, jostling people, and then marching myself lame and shouting myself hoarse when I might have been home planting hyacinth bulbs or reading The New Yorker. What grievance could possibly be so galling as to make me leave my little homestead to shake a Qur'an, a homemade placard, or for that matter a palm branch cut on the outskirts of Jerusalem, at the wicked world? I sometimes realize with a shudder that had I lived when Jesus lived, I probably would never have gone to hear him preach. I might have thought about going, but then, considering the bother involved, I probably would have settled for reading the book whenever it came out.He would have had to come to me."

I shudder the same.
Lord have mercy.