Reaping What We Sow

Excerpt taken from I Thought This Would Make Me Happy: How to Fight Less, Forgive Faster, and Cultivate Joy in Your Marriage by Chelsea Damon

We all have ideas in our heads of how certain things should go. If you consider yourself more of a type A person—someone who charges ahead and generally prefers more structure in your life—then you definitely have a few ideas of what your day should look like, who in your family is responsible for what, and how certain things (like loading the dishwasher) should happen. But even those of us who consider ourselves to be type B—who prefer a more go-with-the-flow approach to life—have lines that, when crossed, rub us the wrong way. If someone is being inflexible, hardheaded, or unsympathetic, it can really make us see red.

I’ve also found that the more we think an issue is black-and-white, the quicker we are to get angry about it, which makes sense. You wouldn’t react the same way to your spouse forgetting to put the wet laundry in the dryer as you would to them coming home four hours late and not answering your texts in the meantime. That’s because you can kind of understand forgetting the laundry—it’s annoying, but you’ve been there too. But four hours late without so much as a text? That’s a black-and-white case of wrongdoing. You can’t even fathom doing such a thing, so you’re instantly angry.

We all know the feeling of anger growing inside us. Sometimes it’s a slow drip of observing annoying behaviors (like forgetting to put the laundry in the dryer) that eventually causes an outburst; other times it’s a single spark that leads to an explosion.

When do you find yourself getting angry? When your spouse is inconsiderate? Inconsistent? Not valuing what’s important to you? Whatever the cause may be, the gospel writer Luke helps us see the true origins of our anger. He lets us peer behind the veil to see what is truly causing our anger: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45).

To be clear, the Bible doesn’t equate all anger with sin. For example, James doesn’t say we must never be angry, but instead that we should be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19 HCSB). However, when anger is mentioned in the Bible, we’re often asked to examine what the cause of our anger is. Jesus’ statement in Luke 6 makes it clear that whatever comes out of our mouths, including anger, is an overflow of the heart. Or to put it another way, angry words and actions are our hearts spilling over. But what exactly is overflowing?

Let’s say that one night, right before bedtime, the kids ask me and Josh if we can take them to the park in the morning. We look at each other, shrug, and say, “Yeah, that would work.” Next thing we know, the kids are bonkers. They’re wide-eyed, jumping around the bed, and it takes twenty to thirty minutes to get them to quiet down again and finally fall asleep.

The next morning, there’s a downpour of rain. Not only that, but flashes of lightning burst across the sky every few minutes as well. We say to the kids, “We’re really sorry, guys. We wanted to go to the park, but it’s not safe to go during a lightning storm. We’ll have to stay inside today.”

They’re devastated, angry, and resentful. You would think we had just told them they had thirty days to live. But that’s how kids are—they don’t yet have the perspective to see that not going to the park that particular morning actually isn’t the end of the world. We could enjoy each other’s company some other way—family movie night, making blanket forts, doing arts and crafts.

The thing is, while we as adults might not resort to throwing full-on temper tantrums, we can still have an extremely hard time coping when things don’t go the way we hoped. And that is what overflows—the emotions we feel when we aren’t able to secure what we truly desire. How do we respond when life doesn’t work out in the ways we always dreamed it would? With fear, anger, sadness, or bitterness? Or with peace, content in the knowledge that, regardless of our current situation, God is good, and he will supply our needs?

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Order your copy of I Thought This Would Make Me Happy: How to Fight Less, Forgive Faster, and Cultivate Joy in Your Marriage by Chelsea Damon