A Lesson Learned (Hopefully)

As a parent, it's amazing the things that I learn through watching my children. The farther I go along the more I recognize that the basic problems of humanity don't discriminate by age. Last week on N. Wintzell, I had just such an experience. My son, Joseph, is getting ready for his third birthday this month, but in the meantime, he's still stuck in the terrible twos. Because as soon as they turn three kids don't have anymore problems, right? Overall, he's a pretty easy kid. He responds well to discipline and is pretty good about following directions. Occasionally, however, his temper gets the best of him and last week he learned a hard lesson about the cost of anger.


Christmas 2011

The toy pictured above was one of my son's favorite Christmas presents. It's a VTech Mobigo and I have to say, we've come a long way from the Tiger electronic games we had when I was a kid. It's a pretty impressive setup with some quality educational games. Joseph loves this toy. I'd find him in bed underneath the covers playing it while he pretended to sleep. It included a Toy Story 3 game, and as Woody and Buzz are two of his favorite characters, the Mobigo and Joseph were a perfect match.

All of that changed last week. Joseph was having a two year-old moment. I gave him an instruction to follow. He refused. I repeated the instruction. He got angry. I repeated the instruction again, with defined consequences for his inaction. Then the fateful moment came, he spiked the Mobigo. (As a sidebar, throwing things in anger is a grand family tradition. We never throw things at anybody, we just chunk whatever is handy. There are probably thousands of dollars worth of wrenches and hammers in the bayou around Landry Boatworks. Once, I even managed to toss a Yazoo pushmower.) Oddly enough, those things weren't intended for that type of use.

The favorite toy is now broken and Joseph is dealing with the consequences of his actions. I hate life lessons. Every now and then, Joseph goes and picks up the Mobigo and wonders what it would be like if it still worked. Watching him, it breaks my heart for him. I wonder if this is how God feels when he looks down at me and watches me deal with the consequences of my own actions?

The Bible has a lot to say about anger, and very little of it is positive. While there is an appropriate type of righteous anger, I believe that it is the exception and not the rule. I'm reminded of Paul's words on the matter:

26 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27 and give no opportunity to the devil. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.

Ephesians 4:26-27;31

For everyone of us, we can probably look back to some person, some thing, some organization, or some relationship that we have helped to break as we have acted on our anger. Let's take care that our lives aren't dominated by anger. Otherwise, there will be lots of broken pieces to sift through. When anger controls us, ultimately, the person we destroy is our self.

Of the 7 deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

-Frederick Buechner

That's the lesson for the day, from my spot here on N. Wintzell