I Want Something Worth Getting Angry About
I was feeling rather discontent yesterday, and it wasn’t the holy kind.
I was angry. The kind of anger that burns like rocket fuel and seeks to destroy, however I couldn’t place it.
I woke up (on most days this is an automatic win; still breathing? Check) in a bed (another win when you are wandering planet Los Angeles with nothing but a couple of boxes and a lamp–which, until it produces a genie, I will continue to reevaluate its value to my operation), and in my own private room where there appears to be a crib, some zebras on the floor, and a whale in the shower. I know what you’re thinking: There’s been a successful jailbreak at the zoo. I’m currently living with one of my biggest fans, a brilliant and kind-hearted man, who, along with his wife and child (to whom all the animal paraphernalia belongs), has taken me and my vagabond lifestyle in, provided me a home, yet I still woke up with a heavy heart.
No big deal, we all have bad days, and, you see, I wake up every morning an unbeliever. At 7 a.m. you can be relatively certain I have forgotten that God exists. Sometimes this lasts for a mere second, and other mornings it continues for hours until I’ve consumed too much coffee and I’m thanking God when I finally find a bathroom to relieve the pressure on my bladder, or when I absent-mindedly side-step a piano falling from the sky by an inch because I’m distracted by a pretty girl. When I personally paid for the roof over my head, I decided I needed a better reminder than not being squashed by a piano and scribbled the words, “God Exists,” on my bathroom mirror.
And I wonder how many times throughout the day is God dropping pianos from the sky to remind me that He exists, but I’m too busy chasing pretty girls into stores I have no business shopping in.
As human beings we seem to have this need planted deep within us to know everything, to understand why everything happens the way that it does. We want evidence. We want cold, hard math. We want science and Pythagorean Theorems (don’t kid yourself, no one wants a Pythagorean anything.) We want something tangible that we can show our friends and family. I’m wondering how much evidence we’re missing because we’re so caught up with ourselves. What if every single day God is proving His existence to us but we are missing it?
What if you spent all day, weeks even, working on a surprise for your spouse or your girlfriend; your best friend? Spending hours putting together something you knew without a doubt they were going to love. You went out of your way, inconvenienced your life, just to make them smile when they walked through the door. The moment comes, everything is ready, and they just walk by, oblivious. How devastated would you be? How bad would that hurt if your efforts went unnoticed? Again and again?
How do you think God feels with every sunset we ignore, every rainbow we walk under? The eclipses we miss because there was something better on TV, the flowers growing on the side of the road, the colors of the leaves, the shades of yellow and orange and red spilled across the sky; the constellations we’ve forgotten the names of? Yet He does these things again and again, every. single. day, without waver, hoping beyond hope that maybe tomorrow, just maybe, you’ll notice.
I didn’t notice any of that on my way to the post office today, consumed with the sudden realization that I never changed my address with all this moving around, and my W-2′s and 1099′s are most likely being delivered to a doorstep in Limbo this month. Not to mention the months of receipts I have saved when my entire life became an expense after I stopped working 9 to 5 and started working as a writer. There’s a good chance I’ll be blogging to you from Federal prison by the end of the year for tax evasion unless one of you has a dynamite accountant you can recommend.
But I digress (but seriously, I need an accountant), at the post office today–completely oblivious to God’s existence–I watched an older woman on the harder side of seventy attempt to return 17 unused stamps. I never caught her name, but she looked like a Betty to me. So I’m going to call her Betty. Now, I’ve mentioned in previous posts that the art of detective work often eludes me, but from what I gathered, Betty bought 200 stamps just the day before, mailed 183 letters in less than 24 hours, and now, much to her dismay, had 17 stamps and nothing to do with them. Of all the problems in all the world to have, there’s nothing worse than having stamps and no letters to send. With steadfast assurance, Betty proclaimed she would never again mail another letter for as along as she lived. And boy did she mean it. You don’t say a thing like that unless you mean it. Unfortunately for Betty, none of L.A.’s finest postal employees were buying it, and it turns out stamps aren’t exactly refundable for cold, hard cash. Betty did not appreciate this. You can’t just let 17 stamps sit around the house! I closed my eyes, trying to wish the situation away (but I’d left my lamp at home), praying that the $7.48 in cash I would need to buy the stamps from her would magically appear in my pocket so I could end it for her. This did not work, and there was nothing anyone could do for Betty.
But it wasn’t about returning the stamps for her, was it? There was something so much greater happening in her heart at that post office.
Author and Pastor Rob Bell says it best: “Some people are looking for a fight because they’re not in one.”
I found myself angry at Betty for being angry. How could she be angry about stamps when there is so much chaos on our planet today really worth getting upset about. Floods in Australia, horrific acts of violence around the globe (an entire Christian village in Nigeria was slaughtered with Machetes yesterday), and animals everywhere still seem to be dropping dead. Why wasn’t Betty complaining about any of that? Or at least about the young ruffians on their skateboards outside, and all the tomfoolery they were bringing about.
And I realized, Betty was my piano. And I finally got squashed.
God used anger yesterday to remind me of His existence.
Sometimes it’s okay to be angry because when used correctly, our anger can make the world a better place.
It’s as though God was saying to me, “The world is a hard place to be. Sometimes I need to get you angry enough to help me change it before you’ll do anything about it.”
Poverty made Mother Theresa angry.
Hunger made Gandhi angry.
Civil rights made Martin Luther King Jr. angry.
I am angry today. But what am I really angry about?
What are you doing with your anger today? Complaining about stamps or waiting in long lines? Driving in frustrated circles because you can’t find a parking space, or putting your fist through a wall? Or worse? If you don’t funnel that anger somewhere, sooner or later you are going to do something you will regret.
God is trying to get our attention every day. This life is too short, too fragile to stay angry at the wrong things. And sometimes the only natural and human thing to do is throw your head back and your fist up and cry out in frustration, but remember while you’re looking in that direction that pianos are dropping out of the sky at an alarmingly rapid rate. Keep your eyes open, and thank God when one finally hits you.
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