Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley was right when he called this “the age of rage.” Not a day passes without multiple news reports of mayhem unleashed by irate, out-of-control people.
When it’s golf pros smashing their clubs or tennis champs bashing their racquets, these displays of temper come off as juvenile and utterly non-professional. And nowadays anger and athletics seem to go together. Hardly a week passes without some sort of brawl breaking loose as angry fans invade ballfields or basketball courts, or without one professional athlete taking a punch at another.
Far more serious, though, are the kind of temper fits that caused an Alabama Arby’s employee to throw hot grease on a customer or the North Carolina Jimmy John’s sandwich shop customer to stab the 16-year-old clerk who allegedly messed up her order.
“People with quick tempers cause trouble,” the book of Proverbs tells us (15:18). If you doubt that, just listen to the loved ones of the Houston pastor who was killed in a road-rage shooting. Or hear the Rufus, Oregon, mayor’s account of how his world turned upside down after the road-rage shots he fired got him charged with attempted murder.
Lost tempers result in all sorts of other losses. What do you suppose life is like today for the Pennsylvania man who fatally broke his chiropractor’s jaw when the doctor failed to relieve the killer’s jaw pain, and then got an aggravated assault charge added to his indictments because he punched the arresting detective in the face several times.
We used to describe insane people as “mad.” Now most of the mad people who make headlines appear to be insane. Like the Florida guy who got so mad at his cousin that he hurled at him a metal cage with a 1-year-old Chihuahua inside. Or the McDonald’s customer who got so mad when the drive-thru clerk didn’t give her a cookie that she tried to jump through the window and spat on the clerk.
“Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,” the Bible advises us. Why? Because people who are angry seldom do what God wants them to do. Two of the seven “gifts of the Spirit” in Gal. 5:22-23 are patience and self-control. In this age of rage, far too often they seem to be missing.
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna Street, Amarillo, Texas. Contact him at geneshel@aol.com. Get his newest book “Our Shack” from him or from Amazon. His column has run on the Faith page for more than three decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: ‘Age of rage’ baits more and more people | Shelburne faith column
Reporting by By Gene Shelburne, Special to the Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
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