I had a bad day. Another fourteen hour work day full of problems and complications, no breakfast or lunch, and I couldn't even break away long enough to use the restroom until I left at 6:30pm. All day I had waited on a phone call that never came. Even the things that break the grind of the day seemed to be another source of frustration. By the time I made it to the car for my hour and half commute, I was exhausted, dejected, and out of patience. The perfect remedy for that is, of course, Atlanta traffic.
I hit the road and dialed up a year old podcast that I recently downloaded from the Pastor at our Church. For the first half hour I listened to the teaching and cruised down 85 South without incident, but as I got closer and closer to downtown, the traffic started to increase and with it my frustration. So here I am listening to Pastor Tony teach about the Word and the only sound interrupting that teaching was my voice barking at unsuspecting motorists to “Friggin Move!”. Okay, I cleaned that up, but you get the point. The more I drove, the more frustrated I got and the more I lashed out and interrupted Pastor Tony with my outbursts of anger interspersed with the occasional verbal affirmation of his preaching. Sad, I know. By the time, I hit the Liberty Road, I was in a tizzy; this sort of self-created fit of anger and frustration and my language was horrible. I wanted to wash my own mouth out with soap.
Pulled into the driveway at 8pm to realize that it's Cheerleading night and no one else is home yet, which means no dinner prepared and most likely a few piles of surprise from the German Shepherd. Now I'm mad. In my mind, I'm questioning why I work so hard when it is seemingly play time for everyone else in the household. Why do I work 14 hour days and the wife only works 24 hour WEEKS? My anger and frustration had found a new target. By the time I cut the lights on in the kitchen, I was creating arguments in my head that I wanted to have with her. You know how you have these little mini-arguments in your head where you are both people at the same time? I even had her replies and my retorts going back in forth in my head and I had an answer for everything. I was winning. I was so angry at her that I was just shaking. I was so mad and she wasn't even home yet! I could feel my face getting hot and the heat coming off my bald head. I opened the refrigerator to find a whole bunch of nothing and the cupboards contained the same thing. I thought, “You work three 8 hour days, the least you could do is keep some semblance of food in this house so that when I get home from work I can finally eat something.” If you know me, you know I'm not starving or anything approximating malnourishment, but you could not have convinced me of that at this particular moment.
When you're 6'5” and roughly 330lbs, your fits are loud. I stomped off towards the front door with what sounded like a herd of buffalo in tow. I stepped out into the cool night air and I heard something in me say “You know what this is don't you”, “This is someone letting you know that no matter how much you think you've changed that they still have a foothold in your heart.” The anger and the venom I had been spewing for the last hour or so came from my heart; it's the only place it can come from. Here I was having the teaching of the Word going into my ears, but my heart was full of filth. The worst part is that I was completely oblivious to the struggle going on within myself. My head and my heart were in direct conflict and the filth and crud in my heart was winning.
A couple deep breaths and a conscious decision to change my heart and the anger was gone and the frustrations of the day that once seemed so important were now trivial. I had heard stories about how God keeps on loving you even when you're not at your best or when you're letting the crud still left in your heart rule your thoughts and emotions, but I had never experienced it until tonight. Just then I saw the lights of the rogue cheerio laden Tahoe sweep into the driveway and my heart, now quiet, welled up with joy and happiness. The woman who had been the target of my venom was now wondering why I was standing in the driveway smiling like a giant dufus. The kids rolled out of the car and they couldn't care less why I was smiling, they just wanted to love on Daddy, good day or bad, they have no prerequisites or conditions to satisfy and their love is the best. Now I understand why He loves me, good days or bad, unconditionally, with crud or without. It's the best kind of love.
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