I Am Furious At The Inspector

His name was on the report and you can see it now when you close your eyes.

Two lines about the roof and a note about the age of the furnace and nothing at all about the thing that has cost you what it has cost you this month.

And you have been reading that page for three weeks looking for the sentence you missed, and it is not there, because he did not write it.

So there is a man somewhere in this town who walked through your house for ninety minutes and took your money and did not see it, and he is having an ordinary autumn.

And you are here.

Now here is why I am writing to you and not about your furnace.

You have not prayed properly since the week it happened.

You have said things. You have prayed at the table and you have prayed with your children and you said something in church on Sunday with everybody else. But the thing you used to do, the real thing, in the morning, on your own, has not happened in three weeks, and you know exactly why.

Every time you start, that man's name comes up. And then the heat comes up behind it. And then you stop, because you have been taught somewhere along the line that you cannot come in carrying that.

What is actually blocking the door

Let me name the belief that is doing the damage, because it is doing more than the inspector did.

The belief is: I have to arrive sorted.

It says that prayer is for a settled heart, that anger is a thing to be dealt with first and brought to God afterward, and that walking in furious is a kind of disrespect.

So you have been standing outside for three weeks, waiting to cool down enough to come in, and the cooling has not happened, and it is not going to happen by standing out there.

You have been waiting outside a door that has never once been locked, and a hot heart has never been the thing that kept anybody out. It is written in Psalm 4 that we are to stand in awe, and sin not, and commune with our own heart upon our bed, and be still, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wrote that to people with something in them.

And look at what those three weeks have cost, because it is not a small thing.

The one place where the fury could actually go, the only place that can hold it without being damaged by it, is the place you have been keeping it out of. So it has been going everywhere else instead. Into your voice with your children. Into the way you slam a cupboard. Into a hundred small leaks in a house that was already having a hard month.

You have been leaking this into your own family because the proper destination has been closed off, and God has never once been unable to take what you are carrying. Psalm 4 tells a person to commune with their own heart and be still rather than to arrive already calm, and the Spirit of God is the one who gave that instruction to the angry.

Stand in awe, and sin not

Here is the verse, and the older translation makes it sound gentler than it is.

Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah. (Psalm 4:4, King James Version)

The first phrase is the one worth stopping on. In the Hebrew it carries the sense of being agitated, of trembling, of being stirred up, which is why Paul quotes it in Ephesians as be ye angry, and sin not.

So the verse does not say do not be angry. It says be angry and do not sin.

That is an instruction given to somebody who is already hot, and it assumes the heat, and it does not treat the heat as the sin. It puts the line somewhere else entirely: at what gets done with it.

You are being addressed as somebody already angry, and the heat itself has never once been the thing scripture told you to remove first. The written word says stand in awe and sin not and puts the line at what is done rather than at what is felt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who drew it there.

And then look at where it sends the angry person. Not away. Onto the bed, alone, in the dark, communing with their own heart.

That is a picture of a person taking the whole thing somewhere and going through it, out loud or otherwise, with God, at night, without an audience.

It is the exact opposite of what you have been doing for three weeks.

You are being sent inside with it rather than told to deal with it out here, and no verse anywhere has ever once asked somebody to arrive at God already settled. Psalm 4 sends the stirred up person onto their own bed to commune and be still, and the Spirit of God is the one waiting at the end of that rather than at the start.