“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

1 John 4:18 18

The root of anger is fear. When we care enough to sit and hear the life story of any short tempered, angry, violent or abusive person, we will hear the heart wrenching truth about why they are so angry. Angry people protect their hearts with the philosophy that attack is the best defence. As little children we may have been abandoned, so now as adults we attempt to prevent abandonment by control, manipulation and abuse of those people we love dearest. The fact is that the harsher we treat those we love the further we drive them away from us. The end result is that our fear of abandonment becomes a reality and they leave us anyway.
When we love from a place of honest and true selflessness the people in our life space feel safe and never want to leave us. If you are angry, your life is ruled by fear and that means that the people that you loved most did not love you, as you deserved to be loved, and I am sorry about that.

Angry people inevitably suffer from Heart problems, High blood pressure, sleep disturbances, vein and artery related diseases and the list goes on. It is so sad that we life half a life because we live in fear masquerading as anger.

It takes a lot of courage to face our fears and come to terms with the monsters hiding in the memory closets of our heart. Many strong men will boldly declare that they fear nothing, whilst clenching their fists, ready to attack. He may be a business owner who fears not making enough money to cover his business expenses. What about the spiritual leader exhausting himself to meet the needs of every congregant only to find that he never noticed the little old lady who sits in the back pews and that she passed away without him even knowing her name. The mother who raises 9 children with a strict and firm hand, tolerating no disobedience who finds that half her children hate her and avoid her as adults. The model who craves food but starves herself in fear that she could be overlooked because of her weight. We all have fears of some kind or another.

Only the bravest souls venture into their hearts to confront their fears and come to terms with it. The strange thing is that once we shine the light of truth on anything we fear, our anger disappears because then we are free to love, work and life out our lives in peace. Freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose. At the very point when we release every person and situation into the hands of Jesus, and accept that people may leave us and situations may turn out to be disappointing, we come into full love of ourselves and we are no longer held hostage by anger driven by fear.