Dear Friends,

This is the sixteenth message in a series on the people and experiences that Christ has used to shape my spiritual life. I am grateful for the responses which tell me my prayer that these messages stir thought, repentance and devotion is heard and answered by our Father in heaven.

Writing about oneself is hazardous. The Lord has been kind and merciful to me a sinner and I love him. Yet, many readers who know me recognize my rough edges and flaws, what in previous ages would have been called a “bent to sinning.”

There is always a temptation to want to look good, rather than be good. I burn with a desire to tell you about the loving kindness of our heavenly Father and Jesus Christ who is Life and Love for us. Yet, I wonder, “If you really knew me, my faults, my weaknesses, my sins and sinfulness,” would you really listen to a thing I say about God?” Probably some of you wouldn’t.

I have been honest and vulnerable with you in this series, but there are layers to our souls that are disclosed as the Spirit of God and stresses of experience strip us of the coverings of pride. Occasionally this process encounters a particularly stubborn place the old time Pietists called a “besetting sin.” This refers to our “go to” sin or the sin we find the most addictive and hardest to give up even with God’s help. For me that sin was a knotted tangle of anger, pride, and impatience that damaged me even as it damaged others.

The Apostle Peter who suffered his own battles with anger and rashness learned there was no stage of life on this earth when we can say we have arrived at all God wants us to be. He wrote of a life increasing in the godliness and glory of God (2 Pet 1:3-11). His counsel is to “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” (2 Pet 3:18).

From Scriptural counsel and my experience, I have learned there is nothing to do but confess my sin, let Christ take over and wait to see what he will do in me and with me. That has meant some hard battles for me to surrender my best talents and worst faults. But Christ’s righteousness allows no compromise. I yield to his love or I break in the attempt to be what I can never be without him.

This message is a story about the yielding.  There is no credit to be claimed. All glory goes to Christ who tracked me down in the wilderness to convince me he loves me. May this story stir his grace and truth in your own soul.

. . .

There is a story of a man who came to see the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung for help with depression. Jung told him to cut back his fourteen-hour work day to eight, go directly home, and spend the evenings in his study, quiet and all alone. So the man tried. He went to his study, shut the door, read a little Hesse or Mann, played a few Chopin etudes or some Mozart. After some weeks of this he returned to Jung complaining that he could see no improvement. On learning how the man had spent his time, Jung said, ‘But you didn’t understand. I didn’t want you to be with Hesse or Mozart or Mann or Chopin. I wanted you to be all alone with yourself.’The man looked terrified and exclaimed. ‘I can’t think of any worse company.’Jung replied, ‘Yet this is the self you inflict on other people fourteen hours a day’ (and, Jung might have added, ‘the self you inflict on yourself’) (Told by Brennan Manning in Abba’s Child (NavPress: Colorado Springs, CO, 1994, p 19-20).

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This story explains why I was on an 8700′ peak in Arizona’s White Mountains at 6:30 a.m., on July 30, 1994, reading Psalm 119. I could no longer live with the self that I was inflicting on others or me. I had learned in childhood to distrust whether I was really loved or not. So to prevent the pain of finding out that I wasn’t loved I learned to keep those closest to me at bay by routinely using an emotional flame thrower to clear the space around me and readjust my boundaries.

I have known others who, fearing that they were not loved, became promiscuous, throwing themselves physically or emotionally at anyone who they thought might love them, if only for a moment.

My problem was the flip-side of promiscuity: If you don’t let anyone get close they can’t hurt you. Threatened, fearful people often pick up weapons to protect themselves. Anger was my tool/weapon of choice to drive those I didn’t trust away from me. I learned to think the worst of everyone and ascribe bad motivations to them. That way, I would be able to cut them off when they let me down and spare myself disappointment.  Where the lesson began to break down in practice, however, was when persons came into my life who were committed to me no matter what–like a spouse, a child, colleagues, employees, etc.

Relationships that I valued were broken in my rages. People I loved and who loved me came to fear me and distrust the harshness of my responses. That was exactly the cycle where I had learned my behavior in childhood. Now I was passing it on. The Holy Spirit moved me to understand this was unacceptable.

Christ had seized my life five years before and he simply refused to coexist with the flaming heart of anger within me. The fact that it was a reaction to childhood wounds was no excuse. The Apostle Paul in writing of the preeminence of love in the life of the Christ-follower wrote: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult I put an end to childish ways” (1 Cor 13:11). When people depend on you to take care of them you have to forgo the luxury of indulging yourself at their expense and pain. That’s how I take Paul’s meaning when he wrote: “We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor” (Rom 15:1-2).

In that summer of 1994, I was referred a couple of clients who told me: “They say that whether you win or lose, you always take a pound of flesh.” This just flattened me. When your worst characteristics become your calling card, it is way past time for change. But how could I change what had become my very nature?

Unfit as I was for companionship to others or myself,  I retreated into the Arizona wilderness for two weeks. I would hike every morning before dawn into the woods and I would spend the day crying out to God to change me.  The Holy Spirit strongly impressed upon my heart to pray through Psalm 119. That surprised me because I knew that Psalm only as the longest chapter in the Bible and an exposition of the glories of God’s law. The impression was clear, however, and I obeyed.

On the sixth morning, I found my way cross-country to a rocky promontory that I saw rising out of an aspen grove from the valley below. There I sat and prayed and read these words–
.

May your unfailing love
come to me, O Lord,
your salvation according
to your promise.
Then I shall have an
answer for those who
taunt me,
for I trust in your word.
(Ps 119:41-42, NIV)
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Reading those words was a moment of revelation. I bowed my head, “Who is the one who taunts me, Lord?” I asked.

“You are the one who taunts you,” came his answer to my heart. You are the one who tells yourself, “You are unlovable and unloved. You have just read the truth about how I feel about you.”

What a truth it is! God loves me. His love will not fail. He will keep his promise and save me through his love. This knowledge, this truth, moved from my head to my heart, is saving grace. The final answer to my taunts is “I am loved and the Creator and Savior of the universe finds me loveable.”

In that moment of discovery, a door opened in my heart and I walked through to free spaces and began to love as I am loved.

I wish I could tell you that I never lost my temper again. The fact of the flesh is that it remains flesh. I am still a flawed product of my past, my environment, my temperament, my physical chemistry, my stresses, and the selfishness that comprises my flesh. But from that moment on, I had a way forward out of the darkness of anger aided by the Holy Spirit.

The simple fact of life that I’ve learned is this: If you belong to Christ, if you sit with him beside his Father in his love and righteousness–then you no longer have to force the issues and people in your life to compensate for your lack of love (See Eph 2:6-7). These words of Jesus always melt my heart: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:18-20). Accepting this acceptance changed everything for me. I do not have to live the way I used to live, and fight the way I used to fight.

What Paul says is true–
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The entire law is summed up in a single command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. So I say, live by the Spirit and you will not gratify the lusts of the flesh…Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other (Gal 5:14-16, 24-26).

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A year after that Arizona morning, I was driving with Patricia. I told her in amazed relief: “I’m not mad anymore. I don’t know when it happened, or exactly how it happened, but the rage has gone out of me something like a forest fire must go out in the rain– slowly and gently, with steaming hisses and flare ups–but it goes out.”

This essay was written fifteen years ago. I lacked the courage to let anyone read it for four years after I wrote it. Many persons who receive these Word of Grace e-mails work with me and there are times when I am required to take tough stands and set boundaries. Occasionally, someone says “Oh that’s just Kent, you know how he is” (wink, wink) instead of dealing with the issue at hand.

Then there are persons who have never forgiven me for what I’ve said and done in the past. One of them, the defendant in a lawsuit I brought for a church organization, rehashed my alleged sins in high school on a web site years ago complete with my photograph with horns added to my head. There is a price to be paid for my past, but it is as wrong for someone else to make my past their present excuse as it was for me to use the anger shown to me in childhood as my excuse for rage as an adult.

On the other hand, while a lot is said about anger, we tend to talk about other people’s rage and not our own. Angry persons have a hard time finding understanding or help. There is no loneliness like that found in the shameful silence after a rage. The fires of anger require fuel and that fuel generally is those people closest at hand. When it’s over, the ones to whom we wish to justify ourselves have gone away or keep their distance against the possibility that any show of passion would draw more anger from us.

The appetite of anger is deep and intense. The Psalms compare the angry to wild, hungry dogs, never satisfied: “They return at evening, snarling like dogs, and prowl about the city. They wander about for food and howl if not satisfied” (Ps 59:14-15). There is no cure, no fulfillment, until grace is received and acknowledged in gratitude.  “Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to humankind. For he satisfies the thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things” (Ps 107:8-9).

I write you this, my friends, not to bare my soul for that doesn’t help anyone, but to tell you out of my personal knowledge of the cleansing and healing that is possible with Jesus Christ. I represent only a tiny sample of what is possible when the love of God reaches a hot and angry heart. “The river of God is full of water” (Ps 65:9). There is plenty of water there to wash you clean and cool your fever. There is transforming power in the realization that you are loved unconditionally and eternally.

Have a grace-filled week. “Taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in Him” (Psalm 34:8)

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Kent

Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.