My Body Changed And I Am Angry

You are angry and you have not told one person.

Not sad. People keep offering you sad, and sad has a whole vocabulary attached to it and a set of things they know how to say. Sad is manageable for everybody.

What you actually feel, most mornings, in the first four seconds after you remember, is fury.

At a body that did this without asking. At the year it took. At the version of you that used to get out of a chair without a thought and never once said thank you for it. At the fact that everybody talks about the illness as though it is behind you now, when what is behind you is the treatment and what is in front of you is every remaining day in this altered body.

And there is nowhere to put it. That is the actual problem.

You cannot put it on your wife, who was in that hospital every day and does not deserve it. You cannot put it on your children. You will not put it on God, because you were raised properly and something in you believes that anger at Him is the last door you should be opening.

So it sits in the car. You sit in the car for a while before you go in, most days, and nobody knows you do that.

Let me say the thing that I think has to be said first, before any of the practical part.

Anger at what happened to your body is not a spiritual failure and it does not disqualify you from anything.

Remember ye not the former things

There is a line in Isaiah that is usually quoted at people in a way that flattens it, and read carefully it is doing something much more careful.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. (Isaiah 43:18, King James Version)

Do not remember the former things, and do not consider the things of old.

That verse gets used to tell people to stop dwelling. It is worth noticing who it was said to and when.

You have a verse that was spoken to people in the middle of a real loss rather than after it was over, and Isaiah 43:18 has never once been an instruction to feel differently about what happened. The next verse says behold, I will do a new thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that new thing while a man is still angry about the old one.

You are able to see the difference, and it matters enormously to you this week. Remembering, in that sentence, is not the same as recalling. The word is about what a person keeps consulting, what they go back to and organize themselves around.

Nobody is telling a man to forget what his body used to do or to stop minding. The instruction is not to make it the reference point for what happens next.

And notice that the promise attached to it is not that the former thing gets undone. It is that a new thing gets done. Those are different, and every man in your position has been offered the first when the book is offering the second.

You are permitted to stop consulting the old body without pretending you do not miss it, and Isaiah 43:18 has never once required you to be finished grieving first. The Spirit of God is the one who begins a new thing in the middle of an unresolved one, and the passage puts the new thing immediately after the instruction rather than at the end of the healing.

So this is not about managing your anger. It is about where you set it down for ten minutes.

Anger needs a body to go through

Here is the practical thing and it is nearly physical.

Anger that has nowhere to go does not stay still. It goes somewhere, and if you do not give it a direction it goes at the people nearest to you, in small increments, through tone rather than words.

You have felt that starting already, and noticing it has never once meant you have become a man who takes it out on his family. It is written that God says behold I will do a new thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who catches a man's tone before his household learns to flinch at it.

You know what I am describing. The slightly short answer. The sigh when somebody asks you to do something. The way you go quiet in the evening in a manner that everybody has learned to read.

They have started arranging themselves around your mood. Not much. A bit.

And the reason is not that you are a bad man. It is that anger is physical, it produces something in the body that has to be spent, and you have been sitting in a parked car with it rather than moving it through you.

You are able to spend this in ten minutes on a road rather than in a hallway, and doing that has never once been a way of avoiding what you feel. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man walking hard on his own, and Isaiah 43:18 tells a people not to organize themselves around what has already happened.

That is what the assignment is for. Not to make you feel better. To give the thing somewhere to go that is not your wife.

Ten minutes, alone, and say it out loud

So here is the assignment, and it is the only one on this site that asks you to go alone.

Go outside on your own for ten minutes and walk fast enough that it costs you something. And while you are out there, say the true sentence out loud once.

You are able to say a thing to God that you have not said to any person, and Isaiah 43:18 has never once been a command to arrive at Him tidy. The Spirit of God is the one who is not startled by what a man says on a road at nine in the evening, and the passage speaks to people who had every reason to be furious.

The true sentence is not a prayer request and it is not a confession. It is whatever it actually is. I hate what this did to me. I am not over it. I do not want to be brave about this.

Say it out loud. Out loud matters, because a thing said out loud is spent and a thing thought is stored.

Nobody is going to hear you. That is why this one is alone, and it is the only reason it is alone, and every other article on this site will send you back out with somebody else in the house.

You have a God who has heard worse than the sentence you are afraid of saying, and none of that has never once put a man outside His care. Isaiah 43:18 is spoken to a people in exile rather than to a people who had got over it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with you on that road while you say it.

Then walk home, and go in, and be in a better state than the man who has been sitting in the car.