Considering Meditations on Anger, Patience, and Peace

I picked a good time to read A Small Book About a Big Problem: Meditations on Anger, Patience, and Peace by Edward Welch.

First, it is 2020. The pandemic has brought out the worst in many. Idols have been threatened and risen to the occasion. Government edicts have been inconsistent, blind to the collateral damage they cause and often exercises in ego rather than genuine concern for the people. This is shown in the utter hypocrisy of many of those in power who disregard their edicts as for the hoi polloi, the masses, and not the political class.

Toss in the personal side of all this with loss and change as a son, father, husband and pastor. Throw in a hotly contested election cycle and an election process tossed in the air by the fears raised by the pandemic. There has been plenty of anger and impatience to go around and so very little peace.

This book by Welch is part of a series with other volumes on grief and anxiety. This volume contains 50 meditations, generally 3-4 pages (it is a physically small book with small pages). These are bite-sized meditations to prompt you to meditate. They generally end with questions to direct your thoughts.

If we can boil it down, Welch’s main argument is that your problem with anger and impatience is driven by your problem with pride. Anger and impatience are only the tip of the iceberg. Lurking beneath the surface of the water is a massive structure of pride. This makes the battle against anger & impatience a battle against pride AND for humility.

So the course of the meditations focuses on how pride drives our anger and impatience. He also returns often to the destructive character of our anger as we judge others and find them wanting in our eyes. This means we then punish them in a variety of ways. Due to indwelling sin this all seems so natural to us until grace interrupts the cycle. So this book also drives us to meditate upon the grace of God in Jesus Christ as the source of forgiveness and growth in humility. This book may be primarily about anger, but it is gospel drenched (calling for faith and repentance).

He does contrast our typical experience with anger and God’s anger. Too often we can assume that our anger is righteous anger because God gets angry. He brings this back to pride. Our anger is primarily about us because pride makes everything about us. In Jesus we see that His anger is about the harm done to others: the least of these, the faithful, His Father. God’s anger is righteous and yet we see He is slow to anger and does not (until the judgment) pour out the full measure of His anger. Ours is generally quick and exceeds the offense as it controls us rather than us controlling it.

Because Welch’s focus is on our unrighteous and therefore destructive anger he doesn’t get to Ephesians 4:26 in meaningful fashion until day 49. This is not a series of meditations on constructive anger because it won’t be constructive until we’ve tamed its destructive power, forsaken unrighteous (prideful) anger and grown in humility.

As a small book, it is one you can go back to repeatedly. Your anger and impatience won’t be gone after you read it. If you listen to these meditations you will be more fully engaged in the battle. You’ll be more honest about their grip on your life and wiser about how to loosen their grip through the gospel. But, this is a life-long battle due to the presence of indwelling sin. This is one of the more helpful books on anger I’ve read precisely because it gets to the root of our anger.