Latest / The Daily Ripples Podcast / April 16 – Letting Go of Anger

Transcript

April 16 – Letting Go of Anger · The Daily Ripples Podcast

• 0:01
  Welcome back to the Daily Ripples podcast.
• 0:04
  I am glad to have Larry, my fellow United Methodist pastor here with us again today.
• 0:12
  For those listening, as always, please like and share this podcast.
• 0:17
  Send others to dailyripples.com for the daily devotionals where you can subscribe and get
• 0:22
  those right in your email inbox every morning as they are published, as well as the podcast
• 0:28
  link.
• 0:28
  But for today, it is April 16th.
• 0:31
  Our daily ripple is letting go of anger.
• 0:35
  And because it is his last day here with us, we're going to have Larry kick us off by reading our daily ripple for today.
• 0:44
  So the daily ripple for April the 16th is letting go of anger.
• 0:50
  And the stone is this.
• 0:52
  Anger can feel powerful, even justified.
• 0:55
  Yet when it lingers, it slowly corrodes the heart.
• 0:59
  What begins as a reaction can become a habit that shapes how I see the world.
• 1:05
  And Ripple One is practical.
• 1:07
  Today, I will watch how quickly I reach for irritation, judgment, or self-righteousness.
• 1:13
  Instead of indulging those reactions, I will pause and ask what response would bring clarity
• 1:21
  rather than heat.
• 1:22
  Calm reflection is stronger than impulsive anger.
• 1:26
  Ripple 2 is spiritual.
• 1:28
  As I follow the patience and mercy of Christ, the Holy Spirit softens the sharp edges of my reactions.
• 1:36
  The Father forms in me a steadier spirit, one that values peace over being right.
• 1:44
  Over time, restraint becomes wisdom, and grace replaces the impulse to strike back.
• 1:50
  You know, Larry, as I listen to that one, of course, and we were just talking, you know,
• 1:57
  offline recently about my normal co-host on this podcast, which is Corey. And Corey has told me a
• 2:03
  time or two that one of his favorite books in the Bible is the book of James. And I'm not totally
• 2:10
  surprised by that because for many, you know, James is pretty, he's pretty, you know, hard hitting and
• 2:15
  pretty firm in some of his guidance, you know, in his book of the Bible that he's written.
• 2:21
  But I think of in the first chapter of James, verse 19, you know, where he says,
• 2:26
  my dear brothers and sisters, take note of this.
• 2:28
  Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry,
• 2:33
  because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.
• 2:38
  And this addresses directly that concept of self-righteous anger, right?
• 2:44
  Because we can tell ourselves that our anger is righteous, but it's most of the time it's
• 2:51
  just self-righteous because it's not righteous in terms of it's an anger that is serving God
• 2:56
  or serving others.
• 2:57
  That's how I would define a righteous anger.
• 2:59
  But a self-righteous anger is only serving myself.
• 3:02
  It's only either addressing my fears, addressing my opinions, addressing or, you know, that
• 3:08
  impulse to strike back, as it were, because I've been offended, hurt, or what have you.
• 3:13
  And man, holding on to grace in those moments for me sometimes is hard because I think so many times we're built with an impulse to, you hurt me, I'm going to hurt you back, you know, that kind of thing.
• 3:26
  And that's where, you know, both scripture and recovery programs teach us that's not always the right answer.
• 3:33
  You know, I think back to I was about three years sober and there was a guy that I would hang out with and attend recovery meetings with who had 30 years more sobriety than I had down to the month.
• 3:48
  We had the same month of sobriety, our sobriety date, which is the month of March.
• 3:53
  But he had he would he would have been that year celebrating 33 years of sobriety.
• 3:57
  And I was at three.
• 3:59
  But I was in a stage in my life where I had a lot of bitterness and resentment and anger,
• 4:06
  and I was kind of getting burnt out with the things that I was doing, even in recovery.
• 4:10
  And this guy told me at the beginning of a meeting one time, as I was sitting there,
• 4:14
  word vomiting to him, I'm sure, about all the things that I had going on.
• 4:19
  And he just kind of sat back, and he looked at me, and he said,
• 4:24
  well, it sounds like maybe you need to take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth.
• 4:31
  And so, in other words, he was telling me, you know, at least for this meeting or for the next
• 4:35
  few meetings, just shut up and listen, because clearly you are not in a place to share anything
• 4:41
  hopeful. But if you just shut up, you might hear a word of hope from somebody else about how to let
• 4:46
  go of that anger. So that's the first thought that I go to with this. But what have you got for us,
• 4:51
  Larry? Well, I, you know, the statement at the beginning of the stone, anger can feel powerful,
• 4:58
  even justified. Yet when anger lingers, anger slowly corrodes the heart. And that invokes for
• 5:06
  me the idea of a hardness of heart, a hardening of our heart and a spiritual heart disease, right?
• 5:17
  And so for me, that's true because my anger in one situation doesn't stay contained in that one spot.
• 5:28
  Usually it spills over into the way the rest of my day goes or the way I interact with other people in other relationships.
• 5:37
  John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist movement, preached a sermon about this.
• 5:43
  And he sort of combined two metaphors, which is okay.
• 5:50
  Preachers might need six or seven metaphors to get out of one Bible verse, right?
• 5:53
  And we probably take those six or seven metaphors from 12 people.
• 5:57
  That's right.
• 5:59
  But he talked about holy respiration, where we've got a hardness of heart.
• 6:05
  We've got a corrosion in our heart that anger and resentments and those things have created.
• 6:11
  But when we breathe in the Holy Spirit, when we breathe in the love of God, when we breathe in God's grace, it begins to soften and transform our heart.
• 6:23
  So that what we breathe back out into the world is not anger and frustration and resentment and pain, but it's gratitude and grace and prayer and love.
• 6:35
  And so this idea of, he also called it holy heart surgery.
• 6:42
  He called it two different things.
• 6:45
  But this idea of breathing in, so to tampen down that anger, it's important for me to breathe something positive, to breathe something positive in.
• 6:59
  Most definitely.
• 7:01
  And, you know, in the big book, you know, AA on page 66 of that book, which is in the chapter five of how it works, it's talking about, you know, this resentment.
• 7:12
  And I'll just read a brief, you know, paragraph.
• 7:16
  It says, you know, it is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness.
• 7:23
  To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worthwhile?
• 7:28
  But with the alcoholic whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave.
• 7:35
  We found that it is fatal.
• 7:37
  And then the next paragraph says, if we were to live, we had to be free of anger.
• 7:42
  The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us.
• 7:45
  They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics, these things are poison.
• 7:50
  So, and it's because there's a phrase and there's lots of phrases, lots of cliches in the recovery community.
• 7:57
  But what I found over time is that they're cliches because they're always true.
• 8:01
  And that is that, you know, if we're stuck in resentment or stuck in anger, it's basically we're sitting there saying, poor me, poor me.
• 8:08
  And then eventually we're going to say, poor me a drink.
• 8:11
  Because that, you know, when we go too far down that trail of resentment, we can't handle it.
• 8:19
  You know, we have that, those feelings are overpowering to us, and they become dangerous.
• 8:27
  And, you know, for me today, drinking equates to death.
• 8:32
  You know, it may not be a physical death immediately, but it's an immediate spiritual death, you know, as well.
• 8:39
  If I were to take a drink of alcohol, I'd be cutting off myself from the sunlight of the Spirit.
• 8:45
  And the sunlight of the Spirit is the thing that gives me life today, you know, is part of my life, part of my mission, part of my calling, you know.
• 8:55
  And I think about when it comes to conflicts in the world, and you see conflicts amongst people that you love all the time,
• 9:03
  and in a room full of angry people screaming and yelling at each other,
• 9:09
  Most people are, what they're going to remember the most is when a calm person comes in and calms the situation and de-escalates whatever is going on.
• 9:20
  And for me, that's the person that I aspire to be today.
• 9:23
  I aspire to be the calming, you know, cool-headed one and not the angry guy, you know, screaming in the corner about how I'm right and everybody else is wrong.
• 9:32
  You know, if I wanted to do that, I would probably go into politics, but I digress.
• 9:37
  Well, it reminds me of a, I think I saw a TikTok clip of a podcast, and this person was talking about how they deal with disappointment and how they deal with bad news and those kind of things.
• 9:53
  And their response that he suggested was saying, okay, thank you.
• 10:01
  Right?
• 10:01
  Okay, because I have to accept life on life's terms.
• 10:05
  Right?
• 10:06
  I have to accept things for the way that they really are.
• 10:08
  It's not what I imagine them to be.
• 10:10
  It's not what I want them to be.
• 10:12
  Sometimes reality is just that, reality.
• 10:15
  So being aware and accepting that reality and then saying thank you because even if you got bad news,
• 10:26
  even if it was a situation where you got some extremely disappointing news,
• 10:34
  at least you have the information you need to pick up and move on with your life.
• 10:38
  And that was this person's point.
• 10:40
  Right.
• 10:40
  That, you know, if I can say, okay, I'm in a place of acceptance and thank you,
• 10:47
  even that doesn't mean I'm accepting with gladness whatever disappointment is in front of me.
• 10:54
  I'm accepting it in a real way so now I can see a path through it.
• 10:58
  Yeah, and I think it's important for anybody listening to know that when we talk about acceptance,
• 11:02
  that is not the same thing as approval, and you just kind of hit on it. But acceptance and approval
• 11:07
  are two different things. Too many times people will say, well, I can't accept that because they
• 11:11
  think that accepting it means that they approve of the situation, right? But acceptance is just
• 11:17
  the first part of that serenity prayer. It's the way that we get serenity and peace,
• 11:22
  is that, because we say in that prayer, you know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I
• 11:27
  cannot change. So it's an honest awareness. Acceptance is just an honest awareness of this
• 11:32
  thing that I cannot change. And, you know, when I approach it that way, then what's the point of me
• 11:37
  being angry about it? You know, I can bash my head against the wall all day and all I'm going to end
• 11:41
  up with is a headache. It's not going to change the situation, you know, and I can punch at the
• 11:46
  wall. And a wall to repair. Exactly. And that's what I was about to say. I can punch the wall,
• 11:50
  but all I'm going to end up with are some bloody knuckles and a hole in the wall, you know, and
• 11:54
  that's, well, if I'm strong enough to punch through drywall. But anyway, you know, so yeah, I mean,
• 12:01
  And it's just many times our anger is quite a futile endeavor because it does not lead to life.
• 12:10
  It doesn't lead to growth.
• 12:11
  It keeps us stuck in the past.
• 12:14
  And in the spiritual ripple, you know, on today's, it says that as I follow the patience and mercy of Christ, the Holy Spirit softens the sharp edges of my reactions.
• 12:24
  And I think about one of the things that I aspire to a lot and try to teach others and give a witness to how it's worked in my life is that concept of responding and not reacting.
• 12:42
  I can't always control my reactions.
• 12:45
  My reaction at a moment may be negative.
• 12:47
  It may be selfish and self-centered.
• 12:50
  But that doesn't have to be my response.
• 12:52
  You know, if you said something while we're sitting here recording this podcast, Larry, that offended me, I don't have to immediately jump down your throat about it and argue back with you.
• 13:01
  You know, I can that might be a reaction.
• 13:03
  And to be fair, today, nor the past three days have I had that reaction to anything.
• 13:08
  But if I were to have that reaction, I know today how not to let that be my response, you know, that I can ask more questions or ask follow-up or just sit with something that the other person said and form a, you know, coherent and a loving response to any given situation.
• 13:26
  Yeah, someone's just shared something with me that's been helpful in thinking about reacting and responding.
• 13:34
  And that was when we react to someone else, they're really in control of what we say and what we do.
• 13:44
  Because what we're saying and doing is a reflection in some way of what they've said or done.
• 13:51
  But when I take the time and take a breath and respond from who I truly am, you know, a child of God filled with love and grace and mercy, and when I take the time to respond from my true self, my actions, my words are not controlled by someone else's feelings or emotions.
• 14:12
  They're coming from a place of truth and reality and openness and honesty for me.
• 14:20
  Amen. And that's a word right there. And as good Methodist, I will say that has been the word of God for the people of God.
• 14:27
  Thanks be to God.
• 14:28
  See, I knew you would finish it. You can't help it.
• 14:31
  Yeah.
• 14:32
  It's kind of like whenever someone in the Methodist church says, may the force be with you.
• 14:37
  Yeah.
• 14:38
  And then you have to say, and also with you.
• 14:42
  Well, with that, Larry, thank you so much for being here on the podcast for these past few days.
• 14:50
  It's been a blessing for me, hopefully a blessing for our listeners.
• 14:54
  And I'm certain and confident that we will have you on again at some point.
• 14:58
  And for those listening, be sure to like and share the podcast, follow and do all the things.
• 15:04
  Give us a comment in your favorite podcatcher as you're listening.
• 15:08
  We always appreciate those as well.
• 15:10
  But Larry, if you would, close us out with our prayer for today.
• 15:14
  Absolutely.
• 15:16
  Father, guard my heart from anger that lingers and hardens.
• 15:22
  Do your Spirit shape my reactions to reflect the patience and mercy of your Son.
• 15:28
  Amen.
• 15:29
  Amen.
• 15:29
  Amen.