Shedding anger's cloak and finding communion

Stop being mean, bad-tempered, and angry. Quarreling, harsh words, and dislike of others should have no place in your lives. Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving you because you belong to Christ.
Ephesians 4: 31-32 TLB

In rolling anger and angry feeling over and over in my mind and the motivations for those feelings; I have come to the conclusion that it is easy to stay in an angry place for a lot of people. It is very easy to let the happenings of day in and day out life to sour us; isn’t the saying, “People can be like wine, with age they either grow better or bitter.”

Truly if one is more than just a fan of Christ, but a follower of Christ then each and every day their life should grow sweeter and more forgiving and not bitter and any church, congregation, pastor or the like that teaches otherwise is fostering a disconnect from God and his saints. Our God isn't an angry God but a God of love and foregiveness.

In real estate I find this especially true, some of my clients for one reason or another leave me, hire another agent; and I could find it very easy to become angry with those clients or hateful to the “offending” agent but I try each day not to let that happen. I’m not perfect, I often feel as if I have to pray myself away from angry behavior. I’ll admit that sometimes I’m successful and other times not so much; it often depends on how much is piling up. I imagine that if I had to deal with work stresses and then go home and have a whole bunch of home stress or home drama or kid drama or shenanigans dumped on me; it wouldn’t be so easy to stay on the straight and narrow God path. I guess it would depend on how much help and support I was getting.

With respect to my family and what’s occurred over the past years. I could have let the words spoken to me, or often not; or the ignoring of my condition or situation; or the words spoken to my parents build up anger, hurt or rage in me. Truly I haven’t, I’ve said what I felt needed saying, I’ve acted in ways that according to my principals, morals and teachings that I deem appropriate; of course diligent prayer was also involved, and I acted in what I believed was the best interest of all parties. Now if that raised anger or feelings of condemnation or feelings of defensiveness and a belief that one had to rise to the challenge of defending some participant in all of this mess, well that’s ok too. If my actions mean that members of my family feel the need to cloister themselves away until they can come to terms with their feelings, well that’s all right too. Truly I have a keen understanding that there may never be a coming to terms; but that is beyond my control.

As in Ephesians, those feelings of anger, bad temper and dislike will take time to work out, or not. I will say this, it is very liberating to shed the cloak of anger and bad temper and forgive, but I do understand that feeling angry can feel as if it is comfortable, truly; that’s the Devil, a deception and a trick. God doesn’t want his children, his beloved angry; God knows that if they are foul then they are out of communion with him and all of his saints. God does equip us for dealing with this; he gives us patience, prayer and he gave us Christ on the cross, Christ who was tortured, dehumanized and killed yet he never became angry, he said, “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” What a fantastic model.