Can you imagine these scenes, girls?
- It’s a girl’s night out and you sit at the table, alone, until your friends show up 30 minutes later than the plan.
- Your boys continue to wrestle the new, rescued dog like he is a friend on the playground and ignore the tenth request to come to dinner.
- Your loved one, whom you’ve reached out to repeatedly, continues to shun your attempts to build relationship.
Would these situations prompt disappointment, frustration, or even anger?
In most life situations, we have expectations for how we hope things will play out. And when these expectations aren’t met, our feelings might be hurt, we might be annoyed – and we might feel angry. And it is our anger, girls, that reveals false narratives we believe about God .
It is worth investigation.
Our hearts depend on it.
I am thankful for James Bryan Smith’s insights in The Good and Beautiful Life, helping me identify false narratives I’ve believed about God. These false narratives underlie much of what prompts anger in my heart.
Do any of the seven false narratives listed below strike a chord with you?
- “I am alone.” I have felt angry dozens of times because I falsely believe I am alone. We can be filled with anger when we make ourselves believe that we need to carry burdens by ourselves. We believe that no one could ever understand what we are going through or want to come alongside us when we need help.
- “Things always have to go as I want them.” When we get stuck in the mindset that this life is all about us and believe the false narrative that it is essential that things have to go as we want them to, we are believing that our way is better than God’s. Anger erupts – injuring our hearts and the hearts of others – when we don’t surrender our desire for control.
- “Something terrible will happen if I make a mistake.” Those whispers of the enemy that come and make us believe self-sufficiency is strength can lead us to doubt the Father’s love. Do we believe that God is so small that He didn’t really take all our sin – and that He will turn away from us if we mess up again?
- “I must be in control all of the time.” God has a better plan than we do. Pushing for what we think is best, and believing the false narrative that we need to be the one in control makes us strive to not have any weaknesses. If we live like we are the boss, we believe the lie that we need to be in control all of the time.
- Life must always be fair and just. It can be a stumbling block to receiving His grace when we forget the life Jesus lived – how His life was one that offered freedom only because life, without Him is so unfair. We can be full of anger – full of self-righteousness — when we react to a perceived injustice done to us or to those whom we love.
- I need to anticipate everything that will happen to me today. This is the lie that makes us uncomfortable with the unknown. We are never going to know what unexpected event is around the corner, and rather than feeling at peace about this, we feel anxious and want to plan for the next “what-if” scenario. We don’t trust what’s ahead and don’t feel God has a good plan and is in control.
- “I need to be perfect all of the time.“ We might know we are not perfect, that we are never going to get it right all of the time, but yet we might believe we will be less loved, less worthy, just . . . less, if we don’t try, with everything we are, to get it right.
What prompts anger in us reveals deeper truths that we believe about God.
What false narratives about God do you believe?