Passion · Week 2 · Sunday

Something Is Burning Well

There was a stretch two springs ago when I got more done in six weeks than I had all year. Up before anyone else. Inbox clear by seven. Decisions I’d been circling for months, made in an afternoon. Three businesses running and I had a grip on all three at once, which almost never happens.

I want to be honest with you about what I was running on. I was angry. Something had happened that I’m not going to detail, and I had been treated in a way I did not deserve, and for six weeks I was on fire about it. That anger got me out of bed. It made me sharp in rooms where I’m usually slow. It made me efficient with people, which is a nice way of saying it made me short with them.

And then it ran out. It always runs out. And what was underneath it when it burned off was not peace and it was not clarity. It was a kind of ash. I was more tired than when I started and considerably less warm toward everybody, including the four boys who had nothing to do with any of it.

Anger is real fuel. That’s the problem with it.

Here is what I’ve come to think, and it took me embarrassingly long. The reason a grudge is so convincing is that it isn’t lazy. It doesn’t feel like sin. It feels like conviction. It has all the marks of passion — the focus, the early mornings, the sense that you see something clearly that other people are too soft to look at. If you’re measuring by heat, it passes.

But it is the only fuel I know of that guarantees you will be colder in a year than you are today.

I used to read that as a threat. I don’t anymore. I think it’s a description. Jesus is telling us how the thing actually works — that there is a channel, and that a person who has clamped it shut on one end should not be surprised to find nothing coming through the other. It isn’t God withholding out of spite. It’s a man standing in a room he has bolted from the inside.

This week we’re going to look at five people. Different ages, different injuries, different amounts of time elapsed. One of them isn’t even sure she was wronged. One of them has no person to forgive at all. What they have in common is that every one of them is warm right now, and every one of them is running out.

Tomorrow I want to start with a man who has told the same story for nine years and has gotten very, very good at telling it.

Before then, one thing. Find the grievance you would defend hardest — the one where you’d have your reasons out before I finished the sentence. Don’t do anything with it. Don’t pray about it yet, don’t resolve it, don’t call anybody. Just locate it, and notice how quickly you found it.

That speed is the whole subject of this week.