Have you ever heard the statment “Perception is reality”? If we perceive that we’re in jeopardy, then whether or not it’s actually true, we behave as if it’s true. Your behavior shapes the quality of your lives. We’ve all heard about people who lived like paupers, living out their final years without decent food, clothing, and shelter because they were worried about finances. Then after their deaths, it’s discovered that they were actually rich, sometimes with millions of dollars in savings accounts!
They lived in fear and desperation when they could have lived in luxury. They belived they were poor and lived accordingly.
How we perceive things is how we see them. In my childhood, I suffered abuse that made me feel the need to defend myself from emotional and physical attack. Because of that conditioning, those feelings and responses remained for many years into my adulthood. I frequently perceived that I was being attacked and needed to defend myself. Buy my life had changed! I married Dave, who is my biggest supporter and cheerleader. Imagine my surprise when he asked me one morning why I acted as if he were my enemy!
It took a long time for me to let the Holy Spirit work with me and teach me to judge things through the eyes of God, not the eyes of an abusive world. On that particular morning, Dave had expressed disagreement with me about something, and I received it as rejection. My anger flared and words began to fly. In those days I still had a shamebased nature and felt so bad about myself that if anyone disagreed with me or tried to correct me about anything, I always got upset.
I spent many years in confusion about anger because I didn’t udnerstand the root of my problem. I would find myself angry and argumentative when I had initially intended to have a very simple discussion about something. Satan had a foothold in my life, and I needed revelation from God in order to see clearly. He taught me that I had a root of rejection in my life that manifested in anger, and that when people disagreed with my opinion, I took it personally as if they were rejecting me. I did not yet know how to seperate my “who” from my “do”. If people didn’t agree with everything I did or said, I felt they were rejecting me.
Over the years, as God healed me from my past pain, I gradually felt less and less anger. But while He was healing me, God taught me that my anger was not sin if I controlled it. My emotions were damaged, and I often reacted the way a wounded animal would. Today, I rarely feel angry unless the threat or attack toward me is genuine.
God has given us the emotion of anger to let us know when we are being mistreated; kept under control, it is a good thing.
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