Living Phoenix

Tag: anger

  • Sunday Sidebar

    Sunday Sidebar

    I should have published the usual Sunday Sidebar yesterday, but chose to get up and move instead, followed by getting under the covers and hiding from the world for the rest of the day. Sunday Sidebar’s are for me- they pertain to grief and the journey back to life- but they are directed from whatever emotions are sitting on my heart at the time. Raw. Unedited. And I didn’t have much good to say yesterday. My prayer: God I know you are real, I know I am made in your image, I understand how you see me, I think. But today I have anger in my heart and I don’t know what to do with it.

    People say give it to God a lot. What exactly does that mean? Hand it over mentally? Ask him to take it? Will it into his hands? All of the options sound like the promises of terot card readings and crystal balls. What if my anger is not only at myself, but a little at God? There is shame that comes with that feeling. God, I’m a little angry with you. Do you want to take that? I know he doesn’t deserve it. How dare I even ask. But David did. And God sure loved him.

    “O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look hte other way?” Psalm 13:1

    “How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my hear every day?” Psalm 13:2

    So, I don’t know what people intend when they say give it to God. Mostly, because it implies he will take it away. And that is not typically the case. He will, however, join you and channel your passion for something better. Not necessarily better than what you lost, but better than your current bed of anger. C.S. Lewis said he sat with anger long enough until she told him it was grief. Something like that, anyway. The point is that anger comes with grief. And it is the last to leave. Especially when we admit there is a God big enough to save people, marriages, relationships, entire populations. And yet, here we sit doing everything and giving everything inside us to our pursuit of him with nothing but what seems like a new plan. I am angry that it is any plan other than the one I thought he blessed me with before. I’m angry it can’t be put back together. But all he wants is for me to share that anger with him. To allow him to show me where that comes from and what I can do with it.

    Tomorrow will come and his mercies will be new. Sometimes you have to hide under the covers until the morning comes. And start again. One. Step. At. A. Time.

  • Eventually the Desire to Heal Must Outweigh the Fear of Suffering: The journey can begin

    Eventually the Desire to Heal Must Outweigh the Fear of Suffering: The journey can begin

    “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
    ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

    Before the dawn of healing can arise, we must survive the traumatic wounds we suffered in our loss: the acute bleeding out, sudden broken bones, the shock, the pain. While the pain doesn’t subside with the healing, we can hope that every day has improved our chance of survival. We can accept that this really happened and wasn’t only a bad dream, waiting with longing to jump from your sleep. It happened. We were actually ejected through that car window at high speed, glass shattering, head on into a still standing tree. The past we had still smolders in mangled metal and leaking gas, rising smoke and dying flames, wrapped unrecognizable around it’s trunk. Our body lays only feet away. We can see our wreckage, but we cannot return to it. We cannot, despite our deepest wishes and most anxious desires, rewind the accident that occurred to the moments before the crash. We close our eyes, the enormity of the suffering washes over us, we wish for deliverance.

    While the wounds begin to heal there are many things to keep in mind. The first, is that in our trauma we can persist in that state of fear and withdrawal, continually hunkered down in fear letting the suffering claim our every moment. That is absolutely a state we can remain in forever. The problem is that the wounds will heal in time, but on their own. And without the proper attention and care they will heal into deformities that will claim you disabled for the remainder of your time. The memory of this loss is debilitating enough, God knows. Why add further dysfunction and suffer the loss of quality of life?

    The second thing to keep in mind, is that the wounds of grief, denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and all the emotions they bring with them may dissipate but the pain is going to be there no matter what choice you make. If you sit with the pain, it hurts. If you get up and try to rehabilitate, it is going to still hurt. The poison you choose does not take away the immediate pain. For all I know, nothing will. Pain is still a constant in my life. But the distraction of healing, the goals you set in recovery, the changes you make so you can experience the best of what is left in life- they can bring hope and at least a little more peace than sitting at the site of the wreckage hoping for what will never come.

    Finally, remember that the suffering you feel while sitting beside your wreckage praying for that car to reverse back into a whole piece with all the survivors in tact is reliving the acute and sudden pain in a way that will only intensify the suffering you have been damned to endure in this life. The suffering you will feel while you heal, and heal well, will at least be suffering with progress. That accident, the loss that destroyed your life, has been recorded in time. It has already affected the timeline of everyone and everything. Let it be remembered, not relived.

    “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one your book.” Psalms 56:8

    This all starts with honesty. Ironic, as a lack of honesty often put us in our darkest hole. But even if your tragic loss was just an accident or the sadness of death, the start of a healing journey requires the same honesty. The truth about your pain, its existence, your role in it, the justice in it, the injustice of it, the inevitability that the change in your reality will never return to what you had once found your greatest peace in life. Pain cannot be hidden. Suffering cannot be avoided. The truth cannot be held captive. We fear that taking an honest look at the monster will hurt us beyond what we feel now. But the suffering of what we imagine only prolongs the suffering that must come.

    We are going to have scars. We will never forget how we suffered. When Jesus was resurrected and showed himself to his followers, he did not come back from his suffering scar free. They were there. Evidence and memoriam of the pain that had to be endured in a long journey to healing.

    “Put your finger here, and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe.” John 20:27

  • Sunday Sidebar

    Sunday Sidebar

    Most often I find myself praying to forget. Despite them being my fondest memories in life, they are what cause me the most pain. Those treasured moments burn like hot coals in the morning and keep me from sleep. If only I could focus on the troubled times, the hard parts, the things that didn’t bring joy. If only the worse times with her weren’t better than the best times anywhere else. I would gladly have the operation to remove every memory from those years. To go on with a hole in my memory where all my hopes and dreams once lived. Unnoticed. Unaware.

    Grief is a sign that you loved deeply. And the deeper the grief the greater you loved. The greater you loved the more painful this unnecessary torture of life’s experience will be. There is no way around it but to feel it. And there is nothing good about what you will feel. It is too big to bottle up and hide in the corner. It is to grande, too much, to deal with in quiet rooms alone. It is evidence you are capable of huge love. And therefore, at risk for greatest loss. When love is in front of you the risk is worth every bit. When it disappears, and you feel the pain of generational loss, the gamble seems unfair.

    I grieve because my heart was honest about my love for a person.

  • A Flash of Anger, Then Much More: The imperfect storm

    A Flash of Anger, Then Much More: The imperfect storm

    “All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

    From the depths of utter despair sits the loneliest man beneath the constant storm of grief. Raging winds of desperate sadness. Pounding rain of despair. Crashing thunder of fear. Dripping wet with self-hatred, the cold discomfort is at least feeling something the hole in his heart cannot devour. If anything might assimilate the emotional experience of our grief with a physical representation, it must be that of a storm. The sudden rising nature, seething momentum of approach, relentless surging with intermittent moments of quiet reprieve and false hope before it’s wrath returns again. Yes, it stinks of the commonality with grief except it’s occasional beauty that can be appreciated from a covered porch or beneath a warm blanket on the couch. There is no such beauty in grief. No such sanctuary from it’s elements.

    It sounds like anger, too. But anger is only a symptom of the storm- the clapping loud thunder that startles us from our seat and shakes the windows to our soul. It is the rising flood, an unwelcome guest in our home, the leaking ceiling that suddenly collapses beneath the weight. Anger. So much has been made of a misunderstood secondary emotion. Our panic and anxiety and fear, they all get mistaken for anger all of the time. But in grief, this anger comes from the deepest part of the soul. From the depths of whatever spark of creation existed before us. Primal. The gnashing of teeth, the tossing of the temple tables, the casting out of an arch angel. This anger is part of grief. And perhaps it is where you are at now but not where you will be tomorrow. The only certainty is that it will rise again.

    But there are many lies about grief and anger. The truth that there are healthy ways to relieve it get’s muddled by every person with a keyboard and an opinion telling us that its a hot coal that burns us. Likening it to the drinking of poison, uselessness, dangerous- as if it were a damned choice. The only thing more maddening about anger is someone, in their comfy peaceful perch looking in from the outside, claiming we should drop our anger and join them out there in the real world where you no longer exist. You might as well be speaking from another dimension. Welcome are those few people who have felt such great grief before, who recognize your place, who see the storm around you and fear it as they once survived what they care not to endure again, and offer the advice of no advice. They offer encouragement. Feel your anger rise and understand it’s place. Anger has to emerge and find a target. You cannot keep it to yourself- and therein lies it’s danger.

    No person deserves to feel the anger that torments you. So, choose your target wisely. It is natural to target God. Especially, when you choose to seek only him in your loss. Exactly what scripture leads you to believe will be your saving grace: a sole dependence on God. So you turn there in an act of obedience. And at no moment will you feel the silence of a closed door more than, very often, that moment you show up at his doorstep. Eventually, you move from: take this pain from me, to please stop letting them hurt me, to please stop hurting me, to…striking back.

    But perhaps if we serve a God as big as every person hopes a creator will be, he can take our anger. Take our wild swings, our screaming, our crying, as we crash into him with the hope that he will take hold of us until the violence ceases and we are reduced to crying in his arms. Anger in grief is not a choice. Our target is. Exercise, art, writing, our pillow, our God…they are safe. The person who hurt us doesn’t need to be hurt back. The person we hurt doesn’t need more hurt. It will provide us with nothing but more emptiness. Living creatures are not an outlet, our pillow is. “Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.” Ephesians 4:32. “God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4. And the anger that comes in waves is a natural part of your mourning.

    Everyone who grieves feels the sting of shame and judgement. Everyone who is familiar with grief feels anger. Grief is not a course of linear steps. It is a waxing and waning, a back and forth, the rise and the fall of the tides of the ocean of despair. Anger will rise and it will fall. It is not a reason to feel more shame. But it is a hammer that can destroy more of the reality around you. So, we must be careful where we swing. We must find something that doesn’t feel pain to absorb it’s energy, or someone big enough to know what to do with it. And no living creature is big enough to deserve absorbing our own anger. But God is. And so is your pillow.

    “I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief”. C.S. Lewis

  • Sunday Sidebar: My darkest parts

    Sunday Sidebar: My darkest parts

    Sunday sidebar’s are strictly for me. They are a moment I am not apologizing and owning all of the responsibility. A moment where I don’t need to connect to someone in need. A moment this is not a ministry, a project, a journey, a creation. Sunday sidebar’s are my moment to spill my feelings without second thought or edit. The silent and embarrassing thoughts that keep me from my sleep. They are for me. Remember me? The one who broke your heart? The one who you condemned without a second thought or single conversation. The one you publicly shamed. Stripped bare. Walked away as if I was nothing. As if I was living a lie. As if I hadn’t been an amazing person, friend, or husband. How easy to not judge the ones you call family and friends and strangers for their worse moments- a moment of need made opportunity of abandonment.

    Festering beneath the guilt and shame, like great tectonic plates shifting, sliding, grinding, carrying the weight of my faults and my mistakes- anger. The person who claimed to know me, who coaxed my most vulnerable self, who preached for sensitivity and emotional availability- what was actually needed was me to be there for her darkest self but be careful in sharing my own. Walked away as if I was a gum wrapper beneath a strangers shoe. Every hope and dream you set in flames and blamed every ash on me. Searching solace in every person, calling the peace you have in your heart from God- may God give you that peace despite putting your decisions on him. As if he brought me peace for my mistakes. No, that was wrath. Divine punishment. Not peace. And yet this anger gets but a second notice and my sadness at your absence owns my daily life. My prayers for your happiness out number those for my own. While you hate with a cold heart.

    Great pain does one bring who testifies their need for honesty while using self lies to bring about their own peaceful life.

    Closure? Closure is death for most human souls. Hope? Hope is an afterlife free from pain. But if God is so keen for us to suffer here how are we so certain suffering does not await? He is always faithful to his promises but no promise is earthly. So hope is only in what awaits that which we do not know.

    Anger is fleeting and overlies my fear. It vanishes as quickly as it came, but the fear remains. The desire to be whole again, the reality I will not, and my only prayer that the person that took everything that made me human will remain happy, safe, and whole- that is the reality of life. But the small glimpses of beauty- the stars, the trees, the approaching storm clouds, the sound of laughter- keeps my hope in God as my memory of what was the most beautiful fades away day-by-day.