I Was Just Thinking I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!
	SEPTEMBER 2005

by Don Huntington, Editor In Chief

When you look for the bad in people, expecting to find it... you surely will. (Benjamin Franklin)

I’m increasingly more troubled by the hostile attitude displayed by many people (sometimes by myself) against others with whom they disagree. Some of us can become enraged at the drop of a hat. And, as a friend of mine likes to put it, we carry around a large box of hats. For example, my wife, Rae, saw a woman carry a copy of CS Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe up to the sales desk in a Christian bookstore and question the store for selling books that had to do with witches.

The righteously indignant woman was behaving according to the norms of a large part of our society. Nothing is more common than being contrary. No matter what anybody tries to do, a group of protestors will band together to oppose it. The angry people might be atheists or pastors, housewives or harlots, but they share the single quality of unrestrained fury. They “are mad as heck and aren’t going to take it any more,” to paraphrase a famous line from a movie.

The Bible says, “An angry man stirs up dissension, and a hot-tempered one commits many sins.” And, even more to the point, “Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.” It seems to me that a lot of people miss that last principle: that love covers over wrongs.

We don’t really need the Bible to tell us about anger’s bad effects. “Never in this world can hatred be stilled by hatred,” Buddha said, “it will be stilled only by non-hatred — this is the law Eternal.” If by “non-hatred” Buddha meant “love,” then he got the matter exactly right. Hatred and criticism are a matched pair; as are love and a spirit of serenity. Elements between the two pairs are oil and water and can never mix.

I am challenged and rebuked by the words of Aristotle:

It is easy to fly into a passion — anybody can do that
But to be angry with the right person
to the right extent
and at the right time
and with the right object
and in the right way
that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it.

I’m one of the people Aristotle wrote about who lacks the ability to get my anger “right.” Things surely are going on in our culture that I don’t approve of, and that I work against and vote against. But one of the things in my own heart that I work against are the feelings of hostility and the judgmental attitudes that my disapproval always tries to create.

I’ve come to realize that none of my ringing denouncements in the past ever accomplished one bit of good. They always pulled down my own spirit and exerted a negative effect upon the people around me. I’ve proved on many occasions the truth of the Bible’s assertion that “the wrath of man does not promote the righteousness of God.”

Besides that, the Bible requires me to forgive people for their offenses — not because they deserve forgiveness (very often they do not), but because I need to have a forgiving spirit for the sake of my own inner weather.

Someone named Hannah More was correct when she wrote, “Forgiveness is the economy of the heart..., the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.”

Another awful outcome of negative, critical thinking is that it actually brings out the worst in the people being criticized, as Franklin said in this month’s quote.

If I expect you to be a bad person, I will search for your badness and will probably find it. However, I can turn Franklin’s quote around because the result is also true that when I look for the good in people, expecting to find it, I probably will.

People tend to live up to or down to our expectations. How much more positive will my effect upon the people around me be if I approach the worst of them as though they were honorable, worthy human beings! There is the possibility that they will eventually come to trust me enough to hear what I have to say and make a change I think is necessary.

At any rate, I’m determined to look for the good in people I meet however difficult the search may be! I’m sick and tired of letting my petty angers and passions push me around and I’m not going to take it any more!