Predictable Anger

Download: Audio

Scripture Reading: Mark 15:33-39 (NRSV)

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. Read more…

Looking to Sunday

by Elaine Poproski

Back when I was new to pastoral ministry, when my experience of people who were different from me was still relatively limited, when I was convinced that everyone struggling with life wants a better life, which I was also convinced I knew how to define, I met Jade.[1] Jade was living with her boyfriend, who was not a nice guy. He belittled her, he beat her up, and just before I met Jade he’d wrapped his hands around her neck and nearly choked her to death. Jade wanted out. She wanted to go to college and have a career – or even just a decent job. She wanted to move to somewhere her boyfriend wouldn’t find her. She needed help. So my church stepped up. A family in the church took her into their spare room to give her time to figure things out. Others towed her broken down trailer to a hidden corner of their property so her boyfriend wouldn’t steal her stuff. We paid thousands of dollars in back rent and utility bills she owed. And when she decided where she wanted to live and go to school, we got her there.

It was months and months before I heard from Jade again. She called me out of the blue because she needed money. She was back with her boyfriend (he wasn’t really so bad anymore, she told me), she’d found it too much work to find a job or figure out how to go to school, so she was still collecting a monthly government cheque. Her life was great, she said. She just needed money. I told her there was no more money. And I didn’t hear from her again.

I was angry. I felt used. I felt like she owed us, after all we’d done for her, to at least attempt the better life we’d been willing to sacrifice for her to have. I was naïve. I was inexperienced. I was arrogant. And I had clearly not loved her with the kind of unconditional, all-consuming love with which Jesus loves.

This Sunday, Gene Tempelmeyer (recently retired pastor from Spring Garden Baptist and long-time friend of Walmer) will invite us to take an honest look at the anger we sometimes experience when things don’t go as planned or expected. We’ll be reminded that life, and the people we encounter in life, are not ours to control. And we’ll be reminded that it’s o.k., because God has it all figured out and we can trust Him to take care of things.

As you prepare for Sunday, I invite you to consider your own life and the people who are in your life. Consider especially those that aren’t as you’d hoped or planned. Where do you see God in those circumstances or in your encounters with those people? Are you able to hand them over to God and to leave them in His hands? Do you trust Him with them? Can you forgive them for not living up to your expectation of them? What do you need from God so that you can do like Jesus did as He hung dying on the cross, and spoke “Father, forgive them…”?

[1] Not her real name.