Video games. That’s where it comes out for me the easiest. If I’m going to get angry, it’s generally when I’m getting schooled, and I don’t think I should be. If I’m running along in Fortnite against clearly superior players and I keep getting taken out, of if I get stuck on a level in another game that I just can’t beat, my temper begins to flare.
It’s an old habit.
I can remember being a kid playing, well…pretty much anything, and getting so angry I’d send that little rectangular controller from my NES flying at the TV screen. Bluntly, I remember ragequitting before it was called ragequitting. It could have been Tetris. It could have been Super Mario Bros. or SMB 3 (come on – we all know SMB 2 sucked). Regardless, if there was an opportunity to lose my temper, I was probably going to lose it. Thing is, I didn’t learn that from nowhere.
Like many of you who grew up in the seventies and eighties like me, you may have grown up with a dad who wasn’t afraid to let his anger show. After all, it wasn’t a time where “touchy-feely crap,” as Red Foreman might say, was en vogue fathering advice. So, I saw an example, and I learned.
“Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.”
Proverbs 22:24-25 (ESV)
Words of the Wise.
That’s the subheading given in Proverbs 22 in the ESV where we find these verses. When Solomon wrote these words millennia ago, he was clearly talking about being careful about who we connect with in firsthand relationships. As we go throughout our daily lives, we come in contact with people who influence us every day. Solomon warns us here not to get to close to those who have a short fuse and display it often, but as I read it about 2,800 years later, I’m given to wonder two points.
First, I wonder what this means for people who cannot (easily) escape the “man given to anger.” For some people growing up, this is a parent or caretaker. For some kids, it may be a coach. What if it’s your boss? Your spouse? I think of the countless women who have gotten into a relationship with the wrathful man, not realizing it until they are married and kids are in the picture, or the children who grow up watching a parent demonstrate these behaviors regularly.
There’s a reason abuse patterns persist generationally.
Second, I consider that Solomon did not experience anything like Twitter or Facebook, Cable TV or Netflix, or any mass or social media. What words of the wise would work here? For Solomon, it was about those who have influence, and that meant firsthand connections, but here and now? We allow influencers into our living room on a nightly basis, and they might not be the best influences.
These thoughts should cause us to pause and consider a few questions.
- Who has influenced me in terms of how I express anger?
- How do I express anger?
- Would I be pleased if my kids expressed anger the way I do?
- Do the influencers I allow into my home help or hinder me in this area?
- Would I be pleased if my kids expressed anger the way they do?
Given that Solomon’s words here fall under the umbrella of wisdom, we should carefully reflect on the answers to these questions. And, if we don’t like those answers, then maybe it’s time for some changes.
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