I Am Not Sad, I Am Angry

You did not cry.

You got into the car in the parking lot after the call and you slammed the door hard enough that a woman two spaces over looked up, and you sat there with both hands on the wheel and your jaw set, and what was going through you was not sadness at all.

It was heat.

At the seller, who took a lower offer from somebody who could close faster. At the agent, who said sorry in a voice that had said sorry a thousand times. At your own bank, at the calendar, at whoever decided that the six weeks you spent doing everything asked of you counted for exactly nothing.

And you drove home furious, and you cooked dinner furious, and at about nine o clock that night you caught sight of yourself in the hallway mirror and thought: this is not grief, this is temper, and you should be better than this.

So you put it away.

And it has been six days now and it has not gone anywhere. It has gone underground, which is a different thing, and it comes out sideways at people who did not do it, and every time it does you get a little more certain that you have disqualified yourself from being comforted about any of it.

Anger is a grief with somewhere to go

Let me tell you what I think happened in that parking lot, and it is not the verdict handed down in the hallway mirror.

Grief looks for a direction. When something is taken and there is a person who took it, the grief goes that way and it comes out hot. When there is nobody to aim at, it turns inward and it comes out as tears. Same loss. Different geography.

You had somebody to aim at. There was a seller, and an agent, and a decision made in a room you were not in. So the grief went outward and it arrived as fire.

You are not a woman with a temper problem. You are a woman who was robbed of something and had somewhere to look while it happened. It is written in Psalm 62 that we are to pour out our heart before Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that car since the door slammed.

And here is the trap you have walked into, and I want to name it precisely, because it is costing you the comfort you actually need.

You decided that sad people get comforted and angry people get corrected.

So you sorted yourself into the second pile, and you have been standing in it for six days waiting to be told off, and the whole time the comfort has been sitting there unclaimed because you will not present the real thing in order to receive it.

You have been holding out a version of yourself you thought was more acceptable, and God has never once needed you tidy before He would come near you. Psalm 62 says pour out your heart before him and does not specify what should be in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that invitation open at nine o clock at night.

What the psalm actually invites

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice how few conditions are on it.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah. (Psalm 62:8, King James Version)

Pour out your heart.

Not present your heart. Not tidy your heart and then bring it. Not sort the acceptable feelings from the unacceptable ones and bring the first pile.

Pour it out. Which is what you do with a container when you want it empty, and it does not let you choose what comes out first.

And think about who wrote that. David, who in the psalms is furious a great deal of the time. He is angry at his enemies, angry at his friends, angry at the silence, and on more than one page he says so in language that would not be allowed in most churches. And the Spirit of God preserved every line of it.

You are invited to bring the whole container and not the selected contents, and no feeling of yours has ever once been sorted out before it was allowed in. The written word says pour out your heart before him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has never asked anybody to arrive already calm.

That is the difference between pouring something out and leaking it, which is what has been happening for six days.

Leaking is what anger does when it has been refused a proper destination. It comes out at your husband over something about the dishwasher. It comes out at a driver who did nothing. Pouring out is when the whole thing goes somewhere on purpose, to somebody who can take it.

You have a destination for this that can hold all of it, and there has never once been a version of you that arrived too hot for God to receive. The Spirit of God is the one making that possible right now, and Psalm 62 is where the invitation is written down in plain words.