Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1179 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Anger, A Peculiar Yet Predictable Emotion – Meditation Monday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before.

Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase wisdom and create a living legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1179 of our trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday.

Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and praying. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and make sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you too will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind. 

Anger, we all struggle with controlling it in our lives. For some, it is easily kindled, and as a result, it is external and very evident. For others, it bubbles just under the surface and comes out in passive aggressive ways. In today’s meditation, let us consider:
Anger – A Peculiar Yet Predictable Emotion


Anger. It’s a peculiar yet predictable emotion. It begins as a drop of water. An irritant. A frustration. Nothing big, just an aggravation. Someone gets your parking place. Someone pulls in front of you on the freeway. A waitress is slow, and you are in a hurry. The toast burns. Drops of water. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Yet, get enough of these seemingly innocent drops of anger, and before long, you’ve got a bucket full of rage. Walking revenge. Blind bitterness. Unharnessed hatred. We trust no one and bare our teeth at anyone who gets near. We become walking time bombs that, given just the right tension and fear, could explode.



Yet, what do we do? We can’t deny that our anger exists. How do we harness it? A good option is found in Luke 23:34. Here, Jesus speaks about the mob that killed him. Jesus said, “'Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.' And the soldiers gambled for his clothes by throwing dice."

Look carefully. It’s as if Jesus considered this bloodthirsty, death-hungry crowd not as murderers, but as victims. It’s as if he saw in their faces, not hatred but confusion. It’s as if he regarded them not as a militant mob but, as he put it in Matthew 9:36, "When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."

Yet, Jesus said, “They don’t know what they are doing.” When you think about it, they didn’t. They hadn’t the faintest idea of what they were doing. They were a stir-crazy mob, mad at something they couldn’t see, so they took it out on, of all people, God. But they didn’t know what they were doing.

And many times, neither do we. We are still, as much as we hate to admit it, as we are told in Isaiah 53:6, "All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all."

There are so many situations in life that will add to the drip, drip, drip that leads to anger. Nearly always inappropriate anger stems because something is stifling or blocking what we desire. All we know is that we were born out of one eternity and are frighteningly close to another.