Mission Statement
As a follower of Jesus Christ, my mission is to co-create a world of hope, spiritual transformation, and love by sharing the truth of God’s Word and by being a witness of Christ’s love. I seek to do this by exercising the giftedness imparted to me by the Holy Spirit in conjunction with the creative talents and abilities given to me by God.
Confessions of an angry man
I have a confession to make. I don’t always handle my anger well.
The truth is that I grew up at the hands of a father who physically and mentally abused me until I was well into my teenage years. I was sixteen years old when I could no longer take his abuse and rebelled. The anger inside of me exploded like a volcano spewing pain and anguish.
Pain caused by an abusive relationship can take years to heal, and often leave behind emotional scars that never fade. Quite often, at the heart of that pain is unresolved anger. Every person who has ever been hurt and is angry is entitled to their anger. However, if that anger is not properly processed, it can eat away at our lives like a cancer. My anger almost killed me.
For years, anger dictated my life. As a teenager I built toxic relationships and became a binge alcoholic in an effort to soothe the pain of my emotional wounds. I also turned away from God and toward new-age religion in an effort to find purpose and meaning to my life.
As an adult, my anger turned me into a verbally abusive husband and father. It also controlled the way I handled relationships at work which sometimes led to the loss of employment. Slowly, my life spiraled out of control until I lost my marriage, my family my job, and my home.
An interesting aspect of anger is its ability to grow and morph into other emotional states. Anger turned inward is depression. Depression lends itself to sadness, and hopelessness. Left unchecked, it can all lead to suicidal ideations. I was seven years old when I became suicidal.
I lived with suicidal depression for over thirty-five years. During that time my anger was all but unbridled. If explosive anger on a one to ten scale is a ten, I lived my life at about an eight or a nine. Fueled by my anger, I sank deeper and deeper into suicidal depression until August of 2009 when my entire world collapsed.
On the morning of August 30, 2009, I woke up crying into my pillow. Something inside of me had broken and I could no longer hang on to life. I quietly got out of bed and went to the dining room where I opened my laptop and began researching the most efficacious way to commit suicide. I wanted to die more than anything in the world. About half an hour after I got up, my wife walked into the dining room and saw the look in my eyes –cold, dark, distant. We were in the same room, but she and I were in two different worlds.
My wife talked me down from the ledge that morning, and helped me live one more day. She took the initiative to contact a Christian counselor for me who I worked with for the next ten months. After ten months of sorting through my life, this counselor put all the pieces of my life together and came to the conclusion that I was not only angry and hurt and depressed, I was also living with Bipolar II disorder. He referred me to a psychiatrist who confirmed my diagnosis and prescribed a combination of medications designed to work together to lift me out of depression and help me control my anger. It worked.
After two weeks on the medication, I woke up one morning and realized that something inside my mind felt different. The depression that had been at the forefront of my mind for over forty years was no longer there. That happened fifteen years ago.
Today, I am walking with God, and by the leading of the Holy Spirit am working through my issues with anger. I have healed a lot, and learned a lot about anger, including how you and I are am made in the image of God and have many of the same emotions in common with our creator. In light of this, I have learned that being angry is not a sin, but that anger can actually be a tool that God uses to advance his kingdom.
If you can relate to this story in any way, I invite you to join me in discovering the many ways that God can use our anger to bring himself glory and honor. Of all the emotions, it is quite likely the most misunderstood, but perhaps one of the most beneficial. Together, you and I can discover those benefits, and turn the cancer of anger into an agent of healing in the name of Jesus.