White Flags Part 5: Anger
“American Underdog”
The movie American Underdog debuted on Christmas Day. This amazing true story of the life of Super Bowl winner and MVP Kurt Warner is a great movie and appropriate for everyone. I was honored to be asked by my good friend Phil Davis to partner with him and Lionsgate to develop a date night resource to strengthen marriages based on the film. Watch a trailer for the movie below, and use this link to check out the resource I developed!
This Week’s Quick Hits:
While it seems counterintuitive, Earth is actually closest to the sun in December, even though winter solstice is the shortest day of the year.
Every winter, at least one septillion (that’s 1 followed by 24 zeros) snow crystals fall from the sky.
The largest recorded snowman ever built was in Bethel, Maine, in February 1999. The 113-foot, 7-inch snowman broke the previous record held by Yamagata, Japan, at 96 feet and 7 inches.
How much of the world's freshwater supply comes from snow and ice? (Answer below.)
Listen:
The Awesome Marriage Podcast is back from our Christmas Break, airing new episodes with my new co-host Lindsay Few.
What is an annual marriage check up? As we’re getting the new year started, it’s a great time to take stock of your marriage. What’s going well, and what’s just not working? This fruitful practice can help you make the most of your marriage and your life together. Join us for this podcast and learn how!
Watch:
It is not a secret that our family of origin has a huge impact on us. Hopefully the good outweighs the bad. For many of us, we never take the time to really look at how our family of origin has affected us, good or bad. We grow up, move out, and get married. We think that if there were problems, we left them behind. But we did not. Now we have “blind spots.”
If we do not hit the “pause button” and really look at our lives, the blind spots remain and their consequences continue to chip away at our marriages. In this week’s vlog, we’ll look at how to hit that “pause button.”
Insights:
Anger and The White Flag
I have been angry countless times in my life. Often, I know I am in the wrong, but there are those times when I try to justify my anger. I want to be right. What I have found in marriage is that it is never good when I am angry at Nancy because I do not handle it well.
The Bible tells us to “be angry and not sin.” I think I have used that verse as a free ticket to justify being angry. I would just disregard the “do not sin” part, thinking that because I was “right,” however I made my point or won the argument was justified. That approach was devastating my marriage. Fights became win/lose battles and I wanted to always win.
Over time I saw that when I won, my marriage lost. My marriage was crumbling around my self-righteous anger.
I do believe God gave us anger. There are Scriptures that speak of God’s anger and of Jesus’ anger. The problem is that, unlike mine, their anger is righteous. Theirs never involves sin. Mine always does. If I am to use anger in my life and in my marriage the way God intended, I need to see it as a warning that something is not right. Then I need to take that to God and let Him help me figure it out so that I do not react in sin.
If I get upset at Nancy, I need to give myself a “time-out” to think it through and ask myself some questions. Why am I really angry? How do I need to respond? What does God want me to learn from this? Through this process I can be angry and not sin.
It is not necessarily the anger that I need to surrender, because I can see how God can use it in my life. I need to surrender my sinful response. The part that feels so good for a short time, until I realize the damage it has done. It is never worth it.
So again I raise my “white flag” and lay my sinful angry responses down at the feet of God.
A Next Step:
How do you handle anger?
How does it affect you and your marriage?
What do you need to lay at the feet of God?
Trivia Answer:
80% of the world’s freshwater supply comes from snow and ice!