Yelling at Stuff!

I grew up with less than a calm disposition. Seven siblings, if pressed, could provide eye-witness testimony. Occasionally, the flickering light of self-control seemed to have disappeared altogether. Most of these outages were outside the range of sight and sound—at least the sight and sound of parents who would have taken exception to childish fits of temper. Isn’t it amazing that, even in the most extreme circumstance, human emotion is within the range of our control?

In his book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, Robert Fulghum tells of an unusual practice among native villagers on the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. He says that when a tree is too big to cut down with axes, the people resort to yelling at the tree every morning for thirty days. Supposedly, the spirit of the tree is killed and the tree dies and falls over. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Yet, many of us have yelled at inanimate objects or, at least under our breath, murmured an unkind sentiment or two. A broken lawn mower. A dead battery in the car. An errant shot on the golf course. Yelling at stuff.

Why do we do it? Scripture tells us that “the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God” (Jas. 1:20). There is a time and a place for anger, but yelling at stuff solves nothing. It is foolish—like yelling at a tree. It accomplishes nothing so far as the righteousness of God is concerned. Apologies to Freud and others, we cannot lay blame our behavior on others. Changes do not take place until we accept personal responsibility for our actions.

What we say in the pressure cooker of stress can be one of our most powerful testimonies of the power of Christ to change the human heart. People notice how you respond to difficult circumstances. “Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear” (Eph. 4:29).