I Am Standing Here Deciding to Be Angry

Tonight we are making curried chickpeas with rice, and the spices in the oil at the start are what separate this from a pot of beans.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put rice on. Cook a chopped onion in oil in a pot for eight minutes with salt until it is properly soft. Add three cloves of chopped garlic and a piece of grated ginger for a minute. Then add two big spoons of curry powder or garam masala straight into the oil and stir it for a full minute, which is the step everybody skips and the step that makes it taste cooked rather than dusty. Add a can of chopped tomatoes and let it bubble for five minutes until it darkens. Then two cans of chickpeas with their liquid and half a cup of water. Salt it properly, simmer fifteen minutes, and mash a few chickpeas against the side to thicken it. Lemon at the end, and anything green stirred through. It feeds five, it costs a few dollars, and it is better the next day.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the chickpeas.

It is that you are standing over a lot of food that nobody came for, and something is arriving in your chest.

You know exactly what it is. It is the anger, and it is not the loud kind yet, it is the cold clear kind that arrives with a list attached to it. What people said and did not do. What you would say if you said it.

And you have been here before, and you know how this goes. There is a window of about five minutes right now, and what you do in it is going to set the tone for the next week and possibly longer.

The verse that permits it and puts a clock on it

There is an instruction in Ephesians that is unusual because of what it allows.

Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. (Ephesians 4:26, King James Version)

Read the first two words. Be angry. It is not a prohibition. Scripture does not tell you that the thing rising in you right now is wrong, and anybody who has told you that has made you carry something extra on top of an already bad evening.

What it does is put a clock on it. Not a verdict, a deadline. The anger is permitted and it is given a boundary in time, and the boundary is sundown, which is tonight rather than eventually.

You are allowed to be angry right now, and God has never once told a person that the feeling itself was the sin. Ephesians 4:26 opens with a permission and then hands over a clock rather than a rebuke, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at nine at night.

You have not failed spiritually in the last four minutes, and heaven has never once graded a person on the arrival of a feeling. It is written that we are to be angry and not sin, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the curry is darkening.

What the five minutes will decide

Now let me be very practical about the window, because this is the part that matters.

Right now the anger has a list. The list is accurate. Every item on it is a real thing that a real person did or did not do, and you could recite it and every fact would hold up.

And that is precisely why it is dangerous. An accurate list, delivered while a person is standing over uneaten food at nine at night, does more damage than an inaccurate one, because it cannot be dismissed and it cannot be taken back.

You are permitted to feel every bit of this, and God has never once called the arrival of a feeling a sin. Ephesians 4:26 opens with be ye angry and then hands over a clock rather than a verdict, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person steady inside a five minute window.

The five minutes are going to decide whether tonight becomes a thing you dealt with or a thing you now have to repair.

Feeling the anger is not a verdict on your character. Sending it at nine o'clock might become a thing you have to live with.

You are not a bitter person, and God has never once read a hard five minutes as a report on somebody's heart. The passage separates the anger from the sinning explicitly rather than lumping them together, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds that distinction open when a person most needs it.

You have been let down tonight and that is real, and naming it is not the same as firing it at anybody. Ephesians 4 is written to people living closely enough to genuinely provoke each other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody through a five minute window without a casualty.

Give your hands something and give the anger a deadline

Here is the practical part, and there are two halves.

First, your hands. Do not stand still. Standing still over uneaten food with a phone in reach is the single worst arrangement available. Get containers out and portion the whole pot. It takes eight minutes, it uses your hands, and at the end of it there are five meals stacked up instead of a monument on a stove.

Second, the deadline. The verse gives you until sundown, and sundown is tonight, so give it tonight. Not by saying nothing forever, which is how people become quietly hard. Say what you need to say tomorrow, in daylight, in a normal voice, when the food is not in the room.

Tomorrow you will say a true sentence. Tonight you would say a true sentence with nine o'clock attached to it, and the nine o'clock is what people remember.

You are able to hold this until morning, and God has never once asked anybody to swallow a thing permanently to keep the peace. Ephesians 4:26 gives both a permission and a deadline in a single line, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a pair of hands and a container into the thing that gets somebody to the deadline.