Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Anger followed by comfort

You will say in that day; I will give thanks to you, O Lord, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me.

I was reading a blog post today about this passage. (It is Isaiah 12:1.) She called the passage "words of discomfort." Imagine a person being angry with you, with all of the accompanying passion, and then turning the anger away, and comforting you. To the writer of the post, this sounded -- well, not comforting.

Do you find the words to be discomforting?

I can see her point in some ways. The time between a person's anger and their forgiveness is not a comfortable place to be.

She goes on to say that we take these words out of context. They are written to a corporate group -- to Judah -- and when we remove them from their context, they sound like words written to an individual. Does the idea that these words are directed to a corporate group make them sound different than if they were directed to an individual? I'm not sure. I know when I am part of a group against which anger is directed, I still feel the anger in a personal manner.

Songbird ends her post with something profound. She said that she needs God to be more than an angry mom -- a mom who gets angry when something is broken and then comforts the child as the anger passes. She needs God to be more than what she is herself -- bigger, less human, less limited than she is. Amen.

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