Sunday, November 05, 2006

Anger at God

A friend gave me this short essay or comment:
We all experience times when we feel angry with God. Perhaps, in the past our reaction to this anger has been to pretend it did not exist, denying our anger to God and to ourselves. or, perhaps we reacted to it by giving up on prayer entirely. As we seek to to recover with God's help, neither option will work.

We must go ahead and express our anger, but we must also keep talking to God. The anger passes, answers come, and we find that we have drawn closer to God through this experience. We clarify issues, we express our feelings honestly, and we communicate in a very tangible way with the higher power that we need.
Grief and loss cause anger. I know people whose anger is larger than they are and that they can not deal with. Everything else they have been able to cope with, to accept and to integrate, except for their anger with God. Anger with God may be even more damaging to the heart than bitterness, especially because it creates such blockage and is so far beyond our grasp.

But knowledge is a start, though it seems that in many ways, all of grief is just a start.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We were talking about being honest with God and with ourselves in my women's group last month. A few were genuinely suprised at the idea that a person could be angry with God and not be immediately struck by lightening of some sort.

There's a cycle of being angry, feeling bad for feeling angry, feeling angry about feeling bad... It is really hard to work though, I think you are absolutely right when you say it may cause more damage--because it often goes 'untreated' for so long.

Stephen said...

I don't know a solution either, other than to encourage people to honestly communicate with God and to share their anger with Him.