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I had a season in my life when I was angry at God and it was more than a passing blip that was quickly buried under fear of getting struck by lightning. Anger at God is in some ways the <\/span>summun malum<\/span><\/i> of sin. Having moments of weakness that lead to poor decisions is one thing, but an act of conscious rebellion is rightfully put into a whole other category.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It was a dark season when it felt like we had a target on our back: financially we were sinking deeper into the red while it seemed like virtually everything that could go wrong with a house and car was going wrong, and then finally we had a severe medical emergency (retinal detachment) when we were waiting for health insurance to come in and were faced with risking permanent disability by waiting or destroying ourselves financially by having an uninsured surgery. There were other facets I won\u2019t go into about being hurt by bad-faith actors, but suffice it to say there was definitely a \u201cno good deed goes unpunished\u201d aspect to this as well. I wasn\u2019t actively, openly rebellious, but rather resigned and sort of passive-aggressively so.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In D&C 121 God conditions Joseph Smith\u2019s benefits from his troubles on \u201cendur[ing] it well.\u201d For the most part I did not \u201cendure it well.\u201d However, a few points from this time in my life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When somebody has hurt you severely with significant long-term consequences, it\u2019s hard to \u201cjust forgive and forget.\u201d While that is exactly what we are required to do as Christians, it\u2019s important to not downplay how hard this can be, and to give people space to process these emotions without getting soundbites preached to them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The most miserable people I know think that their hatred is a virtue to nourish instead of a toxin to expurgate. Almost two thousand years before Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was a twinkle in an academic article, Matthew 6:22 captured the principle well: \u201cThe light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light,\u201d and the D&C version: \u201cand if your eye be single to my glory, your whole bodies shall be filled with light, and there shall be no darkness in you.\u201d The logical corollary, of course, being that if you\u2019re focused on the hate there is no light in you, and there are definitely some like that. Do what you need to do to not stew. You don\u2019t have to sing hymns all day, just give your cogitations somewhere else to go to stop the spiral downwards. Stopping the bleeding is the first step.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The times in my life when I\u2019ve made substantive personal\/spiritual progress were times when I was stretched beyond what was comfortable or even slightly uncomfortable, and observationally it seems like the same is true for many others, although I\u2019m not claiming that some of the more spiritual among us can\u2019t make progress through scripture study in a comfortable chair in a paid-off house.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, I doubt Dostoevsky would have been able to author <\/span>The Brothers Karamazov<\/span><\/i> had he not had a life-destroying gambling addiction, a child who died young, and years of hard labor in a Siberian prison. I never visited with a bishop during this time (at DefCon 1 in your life you don\u2019t really have time), but it made me appreciate real-world experience. I want my bishop to have life furrows in his face that are deeper than mine. I want a bishop whose son died of a drug overdose, a <\/span>divorc\u00e9<\/span>; not some handsome scion of an umpteenth generation blue blood Mormon family that has never been passed over for promotion, whose smile is just a little too big, and whose favorite work of moving literature is <\/span>7 Habits of Highly Effective People<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n My most memorable religion professor at BYU (you probably would have heard of him, but he is unfortunately no longer with us) alluded in class to being a recovered pill addict, and mentioned that in our darkest moments we feel like we are in the deepest, darkest pit possible, but don\u2019t realize that there are pits far beneath ours, and He has descended below all of them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout this season the common \u201cother people are hurting worse than you\u201d refrain kept popping up in the back of my mind, but this just contributes to the kind of \u201clife sucks and then you die\u201d catastrophizing about human existence in general that isn\u2019t helpful.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I have my own theodicy beliefs that track with what I think of as being standard LDS answers, but when you\u2019re in the middle of drowning the more theological Rubik\u2019s Cube-style form of intellectual theodicy analyses are also not helpful.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that they aren\u2019t valid, just that they aren\u2019t helpful. A personal testimony of a gospel-centered theodicy comes the way other testimonies do\u2014from personal spiritual experience, and not logical argument, although that\u2019s not to concede that the latter aren\u2019t necessarily valid.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Old Testament often uses the term \u201cjealous\u201d to describe God.\u00a0 I wonder if the Hebrew lacks the immature and petty connotations that we have for that word in English, but whatever the case, speaking personally, you aren\u2019t going to hurt His feelings or cause resentment even in your worst moments of angry, sacrilegious weakness.\u00a0 He will, if you allow Him, wrap His arms around you even tighter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I have a little edge to me that I didn\u2019t have before that hasn\u2019t completely gone away with time. Being both a serpent and a dove is quite the needle to thread, and, unfortunately, <\/span>Ethan Frome<\/span><\/i>-like, some people let the dark periods break them and cycle deeper and deeper into dark bitterness. I have more empathy for people I consider self-destructive and broken, because I\u2019ve gotten a peak behind the curtain, and have moved more towards an attitude of \u201cthere but for the grace of God (literally) go I.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When we were drowning my dad pulled me aside and mentioned that he could feel the stress levels in the house, and that as the man of the house it was my responsibility to shield everyone else from poverty stress (I know I know, but, and here\u2019s some of that edge, take a hike). Anger, anxiety, and hate is contagious, and if not careful your personal spirals can start a family spiral that can particularly affect vulnerable children passing through a sensitive period in their lives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes people talk about how they\u2019re grateful for a hard upbringing. When I was drowning I wondered how that could be but now, with added time and perspective, I totally get it. I am what I am because of those moments in my life, and I have a perspective on things that is miles ahead of where I would be without it, but I\u2019d rather bathe in broken glass than go through all of that again\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n On a similar note, on one hand I wouldn\u2019t wish that kind of pain on my worst enemies, but on the other hand I kind of wish everybody went through a time period when they were stressed out about the lower rungs on Maslow\u2019s hierarchy. We\u2019d certainly be a much more mature society, with a lot less anxiety about the upper rungs.<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s sort of a quasi-Freudian, folk-psychology belief that repressing anger is bad, while venting is healthy and allows the built-up pressure to be released. This might make sense as a physics analogy, but redirecting thought processes away from the anger is good, and my understanding of the literature on this (Google Scholar \u201canger venting\u201d for the past ten years) is that there is some evidence that \u201cventing\u201d can lead to more anger and often causes more problems than it solves. If there\u2019s a psychology folk-belief that seems anti-Christian it\u2019s venting. Jesus got serious and straightforward with people, but he never vented.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We like our \u201croad to Damascus\u201d stories, and often strive for that supernal one-off moment when everything is made right. They might come, but they\u2019re pretty rare. Sometimes the pain recedes like the tide is going out, with waves of pain coming and going but over time more going than coming. I\u2019m not a clinical psychologist but anecdotally I\u2019ve noticed a lot of people process deep life pain similarly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a quote I recall from the Journal of Discourses that I can\u2019t chapter and verse now where Brigham Young mentions that people are sometimes left in the dark for a season in order to develop their own capacity to stand on their own. If you\u2019re doing what you\u2019re supposed to and you get a blank feeling, that doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re on God\u2019s bad list. And if you get a crummy, dark feeling you can take it to the bank that that\u2019s not coming from God. God\u2019s severe and pointed reprimands are energizing, not depressing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The penultimate chapter in the Book of Mormon<\/span><\/p>\n Job<\/span><\/p>\n D&C 121 and 122<\/span><\/p>\n Matthew 8:25-27<\/span><\/p>\n Revelations 21:4-5<\/span><\/p>\n The Endowment, specifically when Adam and Eve are cast out into the lone and dreary wilderness<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSunday will Come\u201d by Elder Wirthlin<\/span><\/p>\n Man\u2019s Search for Meaning<\/span><\/i> by Viktor Frankl<\/span><\/p>\n The \u201cother people have it harder than you\u201d thought, while depressing in the moment, was in fact true and I don\u2019t want my points here to be my entry card into some suffering olympics. It\u2019s not that different from what others have had to pass through, and I didn\u2019t have to deal with issues that others had to deal with such as suicidality or a non-supportive family. Just some of my observations and sentiments, for what they might be worth for others.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a season in my life when I was angry at God and it was more than a passing blip that was quickly buried under fear of getting struck by lightning. Anger at God is in some ways the summun malum of sin. Having moments of weakness that lead to poor decisions is one thing, but an act of conscious rebellion is rightfully put into a whole other category.\u00a0 It was a dark season when it felt like we had a target on our back: financially we were sinking deeper into the red while it seemed like virtually everything that could go wrong with a house and car was going wrong, and then finally we had a severe medical emergency (retinal detachment) when we were waiting for health insurance to come in and were faced with risking permanent disability by waiting or destroying ourselves financially by having an uninsured surgery. There were other facets I won\u2019t go into about being hurt by bad-faith actors, but suffice it to say there was definitely a \u201cno good deed goes unpunished\u201d aspect to this as well. I wasn\u2019t actively, openly rebellious, but rather resigned and sort of passive-aggressively so.\u00a0\u00a0 In D&C 121 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":44661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,20,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought","category-philosophy-and-theology","category-social-sciences-and-economics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/scranney_anger_at_God_man_angry_while_facing_light_photorealist_b43599bb-0448-4d32-9b21-d12563f18a07.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44660"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50194,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44660\/revisions\/50194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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