A friend told me of a frightening incident he witnessed not long ago. While out in his car, he came up behind a pickup truck that was stopped on the street by two cars, the drivers of which were talking to each other out their driver’s side windows. The driver of the pickup, clearly annoyed about their blocking of the road, was blasting his horn at them. When they didn’t move right away, the man drove his truck around them, wheeling onto the lawn of a house to do so. But apparently he wasn’t satisfied to merely get around these two, for he then stopped, got out a tire iron and headed for the two talking drivers. Before he got to them, however, they drove off.
We know that stories like that are not that unusual these days. There have been so many incidents of anger run rampant on the highway in recent years that the term “road rage” has been added to our vocabulary.
In 1997, for example, the most recent year for which I was able to find statistics, more than 41,000 died in traffic accidents. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, two-thirds of those deaths were the result of road rage.1
So for purposes of safety while on the road, we’d best keep our anger in check.
Well-being
The matter of getting angry, however, is larger than just safety. For Christians, there is the issue of how our anger affects our spiritual well-being. In the early years of the church, the church had a list of so called “Seven Deadly Sins” and anger was one of the seven. But even in more recent times, many Christians have viewed losing one’s temper as sin.
And Christians have taken the admonitions about hold
