16 Days of Biblical Love #8: Love is not Irritable

I’m a pretty laid back person. This probably doesn’t come as any great surprise to anyone reading this who actually knows me. If you’re reading this from another country, you may have simply put that down to my Aussie-ness, but the reality is that even by Australian standards, I’m very laid back. On the whole, I consider this to be a pretty good thing, so long as it doesn’t let me fall into apathy or mediocrity (as has happened on far too many occasions for my liking). It’s because of this that I initially considered this eighth quality of love to be pretty easy for me – surely it’s simple to not be irritable (or “easily angered” as the NIV puts it) if you’re nonplussed by pretty much everything?

Then something strange dawned on me. My shoulder and upper body muscles over the past few days have been incredibly tense – so much so that it would hurt to apply any pressure to them. Then I realised that I hadn’t slept a full night’s sleep for over a week. I recognised these symptoms on a theoretical basis, but never from personal experience…

My body was telling me that I was stressed.

It took me as a massive surprise, because I don’t DO stressed. Mentally and emotionally and spiritually, I felt completely fine – but physically, I was stressed. How on earth does that even work? How can my mind be telling me that I’m relaxed, and my body tell me that I’m stressed? Obviously one of them is lying!

And the odds are, it’s my mind that’s doing the lying. Because as I reflected on this quality – of love not being irritable – I realised that although right now I was at peace with everything (even if I may have just been kidding myself about it), it really wouldn’t take all that much for me to become irritated when I didn’t get my own way with something. It harkens back to that patience quality from day one – while everything’s going fine, it’s easy to be patient.

I don’t think my laid-backness or my relaxedness is a facade – I really am a very casual person. Yet as I reflected on this whole experience (which really is a new one to me), I realised that the reasons I was becoming physically stressed over are really inconsequential in the long run. The reason I was bothered by them in the first place was because they’re not things I need to be worried about, yet I am. They’re not things I should even by FOCUSING on, yet I am. And as a result, when they don’t go the right way for me, it’s so, so easy to become irritated or angry over it.

After much praying and soul-searching, I came to the conclusion that I needed some serious reevaluation about what’s important, and what I should be focusing on. The dumb thing about it is that I’ve done that exact thing countless times before, and I keep coming back to the same answer; yet I continually get distracted by unimportant stuff, that leads to my being impatient and irritable.

What is that thing?

Well, I mentioned a few days ago that I’ve been snapped by Colossians 3:12 – “Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness and patience”. I see a whole stack of similarities between “Not irritable”, “Not easily angered” and “Meekness”.

And to see what it means, we need to once again look to the life of Christ. Christ epitomised meekness, yet He also got angry. Really angry. Make-a-whip-and-hit-stuff type angry. So what was it in Christ that made him meek, not irritable, and not easily angered? How do we define these qualities as they relate to Christ?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s all about the Gospel. It’s all about the good news that although we’re sinners and have rejected God, He loved us enough to send His son to die in our place. Christ was all about that message!

This meant that when people would come to Him wanting to argue their own points of view or how much he was doing wrong, He didn’t get irritated or angry. Instead, he showed us how to be meek – completely nonplussed by what they were saying. He just let it all slide.

But when people distorted the Gospel message, well then He let it rip. His life had a single focus, and that was the good news. If something was important to that message, it was important to Him. If it wasn’t important to that message, then it wasn’t important to Him.

It’s exactly the same in my life. I find that when I’m wholly focused on Christ and who He is and what He’s done, then I’m far less irritable, and far less easily angered – because everything else just isn’t that important. But when I lose that focus, then everything starts to change. That loss of focus is something that had been happening to me recently.

To be honest, I’m really thankful to God that He’s given me physical indicators of stress. If my body hadn’t started yelling at me, then I have no idea when my mind would have finally realised just how off-topic I’d become. By the time my mind picked up on it, there would be countless opportunities missed, and I’d be so obsessed by unimportant stuff that it’d be even more difficult to get back on track.

So my question to you – what’s your focus? What makes you irritable or angry? Is it God-glorifying?

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