This is Hans Schile from the Finishing Well Podcast.
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So sit back and join us on this adventure. The Masculine Journey After Hours starts here, now. Welcome to Masculine Journey After Hours and if you're just joining us we've been talking about the topic of anger and how we can see people in our lives that tend to fall in one extreme or the other. You know, or sometimes we kind of end up at either extreme depending on the situation and this common perception in Christianity that anger is bad.
Well it's not bad, you know, and that's what we were talking about in the previous show, but we're going to share some of our stories of dealing with our anger and then also how God's kind of come after that. You know, but first I want to go ahead and play a clip from a movie called, what was it called, Happy Gilmore. And so I want to go ahead and talk about this because you get to hear the the sides of a couple guys being angry over a golf game. And what you don't know about this clip is you have Happy Gilmore who is a hockey player if you haven't seen the movie and he learns that he can hit a golf ball a really long distance and so he qualifies for the pro golf tour. And so he's in this pro AM kind of thing where he's got an amateur with him. It happens to be Bob Barker from, what was his, Price is Right. Yeah, that's right. He even says it in here and so they're playing together and they're not playing very well but what's happening in the background is this heckler that's been hired to go along and make Happy lose his mind.
Is really what's trying to happen because if he loses his mind one more time he can get kicked off the tour. And so we pick up this as Happy's hearing from the heckler and then it goes from there. You will not make this putt! Hahahaha! Nice shooting soldier! Hahahaha! Alright, Happy.
Nice and easy. Hahahaha! That was not nice and easy. Hahahaha! That guy's driving me crazy.
You know what's driving me crazy? You not getting the ball in the hole. Don't push me Bob, now's not the time. We haven't seen Happy Gilmore play this badly since his first day on tour. He and Bob Barker are now dead last. I can't believe you're a professional golfer. I think you should be working at the snack bar. You better relax Bob.
There is no way that you could have been as bad at hockey as you are at golf. Alright, let's go. Ooh! You like that old man? You want a piece of me? I don't want a piece of you. I want the whole thing! Ooh!
Ooh! Now you're gonna get it Bobby. The price is wrong. I think you've had enough. No?
Now you've had enough. The reason why I play that is I think that's what our vision of anger is. They're mad over a golf game, one guy says something, the other one gets a little mad, and all of a sudden they're fighting.
The thing that makes it funny is you think of Bob Barker as this really passive kind of guy from The Price is Right. He's completely against character in the movie, but that's not really what we're talking about. Yeah, that's our vision of anger, but that's not the biblical vision of anger, Darren. What's the biblical vision of anger?
Jesus going in and clearing the temple is probably the best example of a human being doing that, but Jesus talking to the Pharisees and calling them whitewashed sepulchers. I mean, that's not coming out of a wonderful, tender, I just want to make sure that you understand my feelings well, kind of place, right? I mean, that's coming out of an angry place. God is angry. God is furious about his bride being mistreated and being taken advantage of. He is upset because of all of the injustice that's happening in the world, and he avenges that.
I mean, Isaiah 61 talks about Jesus came to bind up the brokenhearted, set the captives free, give sight back to the blind, all of that. But it also says that it's also the day of the Lord's vengeance. Vengeance is not a happy kind of feeling. Vengeance is anger, and so anger is a very biblical thing, and it's attributed to God, and you're created in his image, and it's attributed to you. Now, do we handle it well?
Not necessarily. I mean, I've handled anger badly many times. There was just one of my stupid human tricks. When I was very young, I hated driving in traffic, and I lived in Dallas, Texas, and I was a salesman, and I had to drive 125 to 150 miles a day in Dallas, and Dallas traffic is horrendous. And I was just trying to get home one afternoon, late in the day, and I'm driving along in my little Trans Am, and this guy just changes lanes right into me and literally, I mean, comes like an inch from hitting my car. I swerve over all the way to the shoulder of the road to miss him, and then he looks over and sees me, and he waves like, oh, my bad, pretty nice guy, actually.
You know, I mean, he made a mistake, right? Well, that wasn't good enough for me. I pass him on the shoulder. I get in front of him.
I slam on the brakes. I'm going to stop him right there in the highway and give him a piece of my mind. Well, he got out of the car, and he was about six inches taller than me and outweighed me by about 150 pounds, and oh, yeah, he had a gun on his hip and a badge on his chest, and he was a very nice policeman once I got to know him. And so, you know, I mean, honestly, he said, son, your anger's probably going to get you killed one day. You're lucky that it didn't get you killed today. Had I not been a nice policeman, it might have. Now, why don't you get in your little Trans Am and drive safely home?
And I was like, yes, sir. You know, I mean, but so anger can be bad, and I've definitely had it put me in stupid positions before, but it's also something that rises up in a man when he sees major injustice that needs to be dealt with, whether it's in your life or your children's lives or a stranger's life that you see being mistreated. There are times that we take our anger to very unhealthy places.
I think there's times that we try to control it and not take it to unhealthy places, so we tend to use a stand-in, so to speak. Harold, I think you shared a story with us about how you would deal with some of your anger in the work environment. Yeah, but since we were talking about that, I remembered another one that predated it. Another one.
And another one. When I was in school at Auburn, I worked at a boarding house to get my meals free because I had barely enough money to go to school. One day a guy made me so angry, I wanted to rip his head off and hand it to him, but I needed to keep my job, so I wheeled around and I headed back toward the kitchen. As I went through the door, I smashed my fist into the door jamb so hard that it broke my high school class ring on the backside. That was one way I dealt with anger, but the one I told about as an adult, I worked as a computer programmer systems analyst, and when I got angry, I had a practice of going to the computer room, getting an empty box, taking it into my office, and just kicking that box all over off the wall, off the ceiling. I would smash it around, and then I would step out the door smiling, I'm okay.
But there were heads peering around the corner, wondering what was going on. So Harold, you invented kickboxing. I'm old enough to have. Well, that and punching the jammies is kind of MMA, really. Full contact.
Full contact, yeah. Well, the point being is that I would always substitute an inanimate object rather than hurt a person. That's a good start, because I've been there. I was known as a young father to put a hole in a wall. Then I figured I was like, man, I hate repairing drywall all the time, so I went around trying to find punching my fist into the doorways or the jams where I hit something harder so I didn't bust it.
But boy, it hurt an awful lot. It kind of finally cured me, but I'd do that a lot too, Harold. That's how I learned to get into the homebuilding industry is fixing holes in walls.
I actually learned how to repair drywall along the way a little bit. I've shared on this show many, many times about my sister growing up. I didn't realize how much the impact she had of what she would say to me to shut up and all that all the time. I really had an anger issue with my kids primarily when they wouldn't listen to me.
I'd have to tell them two or three times, by the time I got to the third time, it was too late. They were going to get sent to the room. They were going to get spanked, and something was going to happen. I couldn't figure out where this just over-the-top anger came from, and I couldn't really do anything about it until one day I finally went to God and said, God, where's that coming from?
They said, because they're not listening to you, and they're just basically saying what your sister always told you. When I could pray through some of that, I could look at the situation with my kids different. I still wanted them to listen to me, but I was a much different person because I invited God back into that situation.
I was taking it from a very unhealthy place because it really wasn't a healthy place when I'd get angry. I'd send them to the room. The punishment was usually not justified to what had happened, especially at their age. They'd get grounded forever, those types of things.
It never ended up happening, but they never knew what to get from Dad. Some of those things would come in, and God's healed some of those things. I've been able to handle those situations a lot differently in a lot healthier situations. That's where just inviting God, as we talked about in the last episode, into those situations and saying, God, what's really under that anger? What's really causing me to get that mad will help you unpack some of that and a lot of times allow you to be able to change into something a little differently. There are times that you should be angry, and there are other times that I think we just get angry because it's pressing on things that remind us of other things.
If it wasn't for God and these boot camps and trying to actually face up to my anger, because like you were talking about, Sam, I love to just hide my anger. I love not to let anybody know what emotion I'm in. If I'm really happy, I need to act mad.
If I'm really mad, I've got to act happy. I can't let anybody understand where I'm really at. To me, it was like a sign of weakness or something. I don't know what it was, something weird. It was just deep in me that I just can't let anybody know what I really feel about it.
And you live in that long enough, and it just messes you up mentally because you don't know what you believe yourself anymore. You're just constantly back and forth with stuff. And today, it's like my wife will ask me, well, what emotion are you feeling? I'm like, a lot of times I'm like, I just don't know. I have no clue what I really feel.
And that's just really sad. But inviting Jesus in, like you were saying, to really deal with it and praying heavily over that, and listening to other men tell their stories and see what they're dealing with, because then you can reflect on yours and go, oh, there's something very similar to that, and you take that to God, and now you're getting more specific with it. It starts to help and does a little bit of healing. At least now I get angry, but I'm much more in control. Like Carol was saying, I used to live angry.
I probably was actually pretty close to that, too. And you just give it up inch by inch. There's no avalanche that says, oh, you had it one day and it's all gone tomorrow. You still have it, but the balance has gone much more to the side of, okay, I can deal with these things, and not that I'm just holding in my anger anymore, because that's what I was used to doing.
I would just wait, wait, wait, and then the bomb would go off. That was me. And now it's, okay, I'm just not getting as angry. And when I do, I have to go, yeah, I try to take it to God, but I will try to figure out what my emotions are and try to express them better.
And just trying to do that has been very helpful for me, very healthy. It is, and anger isn't a bad thing. That's what we keep getting back to. It's just when we express it in a wrong way, we need to say, okay, God, why am I angry? Even when you get angry in a justified situation, sometimes it's good to say what's really under that so you know.
And you hear, oh, yeah, I should be angry about this. I thought of a time that I hadn't thought of in years where my son Eli was out playing with a kid that lived across the street. Eli was a really tall kid. He was like three foot tall when all of his friends were like two foot tall. And he continued to grow exponentially the same way.
And so he was always bigger than his friends. And I remember him coming home just bawling his eyes out. And what happened, what happened, and the guy across the street, the dad across the street had yelled at him, had grabbed his arm and yelled at him. And I asked him what happened, and what had happened was his friend, who was quite a bit smaller than him, he was on the smaller scale of, you know, if you had the little scale, and Eli was at the other end of it. Well, the kid had punched him and it made Eli mad, so he shoved him and knocked him down.
Well, the only thing the dad saw was him knocking him down. So he grabbed my son's arm, screamed at him, you know, and just broke his heart, you know. And I just went over there, you know, and I'm like, look, you know, A, he's a little kid, don't ever yell at my son again. And secondly, you have an issue with him, come to me. Right, you know, and we ended up talking through it. I never ended up talking to the guy again, he moved away about a year later.
You know, I actually talked to him a little bit. You know, but I was, I knew it was the right thing. It needed to be dealt with because it was not handled right. You know, and I think there are times that, you know, we need to get angry, and it's maybe not the best example, but it's a real live example. There are things that should make you mad. You know, and dealing with them in the right way is key. The problem that we see in a lot of society that happens is people don't deal with it in the best way sometimes. You know, the anger that's not been dealt with ends up being people shooting a bunch of other people. Right.
That type of thing. The other thing I think about in that, Sam, in that story is what that meant for Eli's heart. My dad, my dad stood up for me. And, you know, that's the kind of thing, you know, that leaves a huge mark on your family when you actually stand up and fight for them.
Thank you, Rob. Yeah, when, you know, at a boot camp, for instance, we talk about the fact that God created you and put in your heart this desire to fight a great battle, to live a great adventure, to rescue, you know, beauty in the world, to rescue things that need to be or people who need to be rescued. And the reason he gave you that heart, the reason he gave you anger as an emotion is so you can pull that off.
You're going to need it because anger will cause you at times to do things that nothing else will. I remember when I was a young guy, probably 20 years old or so, and my wife and I lived in a little community out in Oklahoma, and all of a sudden we heard a lady across the street just screaming to the top of her lungs. And it was in the time of the year we had our windows open at the house and I looked at Amy and said, well, something's going on. And I said, go to the phone in case you need to call the police. And I walked outside and this guy's just wailing on this lady in their garage.
The garage door was open and she's running around the car trying to run from him. And so I run out and start screaming at him, you know. And I mean, it did make me angry that I'm, and he was a big strong guy, like a bodybuilder type guy.
And I was 145 pounds. I didn't care though. I was upset and God had put that in my heart to rescue, right?
And so there's a reason why God puts that there. And I was able to keep him from continuing to wail on this woman until the police got there. Now it ended up me and him playing chase because I literally I was playing cat and mouse with the guy. You know, I was trying to keep from getting beat up, but I was trying to also keep her from getting beat up. Again, that's anger. That's that desire to rescue that, you know, that God puts in you that sometimes it supersedes logic. Logic says anger is a bad emotion. Anger is a weakness.
No, anger is not a weakness. Anger is a strength that God put in you to be used for godly purposes. It's okay to be angry with your children. If your children are disrespectful to your wife or to your husband or whomever, it's okay to be angry with them. Now it's not right to sin in that anger, but it's okay to show the child, hey, this is not appropriate and it won't happen in our house. You know, and battle that disrespect with anger. It just needs to be handled righteously.
It does. I'm going to throw a question at you guys that obviously I didn't prepare you for because I like to do that. Oh no. But if this isn't an emotion, if this isn't something that- Oh yeah, swing it over here now.
Yeah, it's coming over to you. Let me ask you this question. If I ask you your favorite movie, I would promise you that at least in the top three, there was one that deals with dealing with injustice. Righting a wrong, fighting an injustice. So the question I have for you is, what's one of your favorite movies that follows along those lines?
Because that's what you're talking about, Darren, is we see somebody rise up. We were talking about the movie Greyhound. It's on Apple Plus right now with Tom Hanks and about this guy that battles to get this group of people across the Pacific Ocean. Atlantic Ocean, excuse me, got my wrong ocean there. Atlantic Ocean, right? One in seven chance. One in seven, yeah, that's true.
Only two on our coast. But what's some of the movies for you guys and why that movie? Well, you got to get a microphone, Harold, if you're going to tell us that. Shawshank Redemption.
Okay, why? Because the guy was in prison and he hadn't committed a crime. And he was being taken advantage of by the prison warden. And if you haven't seen the movie, it's good because it ends up good.
It is. It's about injustice. The one a few years ago, not Heartbreak Ridge, I always say that, Hacksaw Ridge, right? About the guy that just was burning desire, Desmond... Doss. Desmond Doss, right? The burning desire to save others, right? To go out there and fight against our government at the time to go have the ability to rescue. What was the count that he actually did in the movie?
They said it was 75, I think it was, but it was as well as over 100 people that night, over that time period. Yeah, Hacksaw was definitely one of the top. And then I always loved cowboy movies, so I could rattle off a ton of those. But that's where you always want the guy in the white hat to beat the guy in the black hat kind of thing.
It's where it's like you always want the righteous winner to be there, and that's what God put in us and dwelled inside of us. Hey, yeah, we love the overcomer of Rocky movies. We love them, right?
You know, Rocky constantly comes back and battles back from all kinds of different things, whether it's the enemies in the ring or the enemy outside the ring. You just love those things. Yeah, cowboy movies. Darren, what was the one with the free grazers?
The... Open range. You're men, ain't ya? Yeah, yeah. Why do those quotes, why do those movies speak at your heart? Because we're talking about a righteous anger.
Yeah. And that's what this world needs, is people filled with the desire to fight anger righteously. I mean, to fight with anger righteously.
Yeah, that's, I mean, it's so hard for me to nail down one movie, but I would say the one that comes to mind more than any is also the hardest to watch, and that's Braveheart. You know, here's a guy that rises up. He's legitimately angry. He's legitimately passionate about saving people who are being slaughtered, people who are being taken advantage of and rescuing. I mean, you know, it has the adventure to live, it has the battle to fight, it has the whole bunch of beauty to rescue.
Freedom itself is what's being rescued. And so, yeah, and, you know, just the amount of anger, but it's also a great movie of a guy who kind of understands how to control that anger. I mean, there's a lot of good, you know, scenes in that movie about that.
Danny? I love the movie, Wyatt, or I'll watch it every time it comes on. It's kind of the same thing. He's just fighting injustice.
Although he tries many times to get away from law enforcement, he gets drug back in it because a town's in trouble or something. And I just love that kind of thing. Absolutely.
Robby, you were saying something I couldn't read you. Animal House, yeah. There's always a justice there. Shrek, you know, you'll find your own version of injustice. But Defiance, another one that we, the guys just love to watch at boot camp, you know, about brothers rising up against the Nazis, you know, in a small band that saved hundreds of people. Right, thousands.
You know, over about a four year period during World War II, the Bielki brothers save, I think, I think it's around 2,200, 2,700 people, something like that saved their lives just by creating this little community that, you know, and it was out of anger that that was done. I mean, you know, they were angry. And one brother had a difficult time controlling that anger at times. But the movie's real about it. I mean, and, you know, anger can get pretty ugly.
It can. But that doesn't mean you kill anger. You know, passion is something that's an attribute of God. Anger is something that's an attribute of God. Love is not the only attribute of God. And love actually gets angry. God is love.
I mean, that is scriptural, right? God is love. Well, love gets angry at times and deals with it in love.
Absolutely. You know, think of the times that as a parent, you've had to have anger with your child out of love. Not when I was just angry because I was mad about something, but because I needed them to understand the seriousness of the situation. Not when I threw my son across the room?
Maybe. It depends on the situation and how old he was, you know, at the time. But, yeah, there's plenty of times that anger needs to be used. But the problem is we use it so often in a wrong context, in a wrong way, out of our own heart and not out of a heart that's desired to partner with God. Yeah, and that's something that the boot camp does so much to help you understand where that emotion and all these other things are going to come into play from a reality standpoint. Because you can't sit there and live in this world where, okay, I'm just going to make it up as I go.
I don't know where I'm going, but I'm just going to figure it out and just going to make it up and do it all by myself. You've got to invite God in and you've got to bring Him with you. And having all the prompts and the other stories and the context of what God is as a warrior and as a fighter and the righteous anger part of it, you can start to move yourself in that direction. Oh, absolutely. And a lot of our anger comes from wounded parts of our heart, right? And it gets touched on and it may not even be the same situation, but it feels like it. Darren loves to say that, this feels like that. And so it makes me angry, right?
And so having God help you delve into that and find out what's causing it is a long-term path to healing that leads you to a place where you can have righteous, healthy anger in those situations and to walk through it with Him. We do have a boot camp coming up November 12th through 15th.
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