Dear friend,
I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words. Then I consulted with myself, and contended with the nobles and the rulers, and said to them, “You exact usury, everyone of his brother.” I held a great assembly against them.
I keep turning over how sitting with anger rarely stays quiet in a person, it wants somewhere to go, and how much energy gets spent deciding where that somewhere should be.
There is a passage in Nehemiah I have never heard preached, where Nehemiah hears how the poor among his own people are being charged interest and losing their fields to their own countrymen, and the text says plainly that he was very angry when he heard their complaint. He did not pray it away first. He says he pondered it in his mind before he confronted the nobles and officials. That pondering interests me. It was not suppression and it was not an explosion. It was a held space between the anger and the acting on it, long enough to know what the anger was actually about.
I think we are trained to treat anger as something to confess quickly, as though the feeling itself were the offense. Nehemiah treats his anger as information he needs before he moves. He lets it tell him what was wrong before he decides what to do about it. What is your anger trying to tell you before you rush to put it away?
A prayer
God, You see what has built up in her and how long she has carried it quietly. Give her room to sit with it honestly before she decides what to do with it. Amen.