Don’t go to bed angry

St. Paul wrote that we should not let the sun go down on our anger. This is really good advice. Why? Because we do not know what tonight or tomorrow will hold. We may not have a chance to clear things up. This is a lesson that I learned in the most horrible way imaginable. My last memory of a certain individual involves me screaming in rage at him. I suppose we may have had a few conversations after that, but I don’t remember them at all.

And a few months later he was dead.

So for the rest of my life I must carry the burden of having never sought his forgiveness for my stupid, abominable behavior and the terrible things that I said. I have sought God’s forgiveness and I believe I have received absolution. But what penance can I possibly do? I suppose carrying the memory of my shameful behavior will be part of it.

Do not be like me. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. All that means is don’t hold a grudge, and seek to clear things up when you hurt someone. As soon as possible. You do not want to carry the burden of having not apologized; you do not want to be haunted by never having asked the other guy or girl for forgiveness. You do not know what tomorrow holds. Do it now, while you still can. However painful it might be, it will be nothing compared to the burden of not doing it. I guarantee it.

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Posted in Charity, Forgiveness

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