Poor Fitting Clothes

Anger is like poor fitting clothes.  Anger does not wear very well on any of us.  Like tight fitting clothes, anger reveals too much about what is inside of us.  Or, as in the case of clothes that are two sizes too big, anger keeps other folks from knowing who we really are.  The Scripture acknowledges it as an emotion common to humankind, but it also reminds us that it should be put to bed at the end of the day before we climb in ourselves.  If we go to bed with it, guess what is going to be there when we wake up?  Anger.  But, of course, when anger sleeps with us, it wakes up as a companion far more foul than it was when it became our bed mate.

 

Paul makes it clear enough when it tells those who follow Jesus not to let the sun go down on their anger.  When anger is allowed a foothold in our heart, it smolders until some heated words bring it to life in a forceful fire that sometimes even surprises the one who thought it was gone.  Anger is one of those things which does not get better with time, it only gets worse.  The only way to deal with smoldering anger is to recognize its presence in our heart and then root it out through reconciliation and forgiveness.  If we choose to give it a life in our heart, we can be assured that it will not only take life in us, it will take our life away.

 

Even after the heated flush of anger is gone, it is not hard to know when it still remains in us unhandled and unconfessed.  Jesus calls us to love one another.  He calls us to desire good in the lives of others.  Whenever what is inside of us keeps us from that one primary teaching about living rightly in our world of relationships, we can know all the world is looking at us in poor fitting clothes.  Maybe it is time to take off the old and to put on something new.