Originally written September 16, 2006

I am so angry right now. So unbelievably angry. And I have been all day.

This morning, I went to the post office to pick up the birthday present my sister had sent me: The Office Season 2 DVD. My birthday was a month ago, but the DVD just came out and was mailed this week. The Office, in case you don’t know, is not only the funniest show on television [ed. note–this post was written before 30 Rock came on the air], but my favorite. I have most of the episodes on my DVR; I have downloaded several to my computer; I quote it endlessly. It never fails to get me laughing and lift my mood. I have been waiting for this awesome gift for one month. I have planned the whole week around it: marathon viewing sessions with friends to prepare for the Season 3 premiere on Thursday. If you are thinking right now that all this is a little strange, then that’s must be because you don’t watch it. Trust me–it’s that good.

Back to the post office. My sister had sent the package from Amazon under the name she calls me, a nickname many of you know. It was a joke. She often sends me mail like that. Today, it was a problem. At my post office, you must provide ID in addition to the claim postcard. I showed my ID. I showed my postcard. The post office employee, wielding her mighty scepter of vindictive power, refused to give me the package because my ID name didn’t match the one-word nickname. Her “supervisor” was equally helpful. They were rude, condescending, and petty. I left in frustration and rage, calling my sister and others through tears. I couldn’t believe the injustice. So my sister forwarded me the email she had from Amazon containing the package tracking information, my nickname, and my address. After a few hours (and hoping for a shift change), I took that, the claim card, my ID (from Alabama), and a renter’s insurance bill (containing my name and address) and traversed the 10 or so blocks to the post office. As soon as I walked up, the same lady from before heaved a huge sigh and muttered something under her breath. No dice AGAIN. Again, I asked to speak to the supervisor. While I was waiting the ten minutes for her to decide to punish me by making me wait ten minutes, the people in line behind me shared their stories of similar mistreatment by said post office personnel. They looked at me with eyes of resignation and defeat. I vowed I would not be one of them.

The woman who puts the super in supervisor finally ambled to the window. Fighting down screams of frustration as I watched her shake her head and curl her lip, I explained rationally what can only be accepted by a rational person. Thus, you can guess what happened next. As I write, my DVD–my BIRTHDAY PRESENT–is sitting on a shelf in the Murray Hill Post Office. That is, of course, unless it has been destroyed beneath the foot (or posterior) of a staff member.

Someone (a counselor, most likely) once told me that anger is a cover. There is always something deeper and more true underneath it. When I heard this, I was relieved. I can get angry pretty easily, so it was reassuring to hear that I might be full of complicated layers and deep levels. Today, as I walked away from that experience, I was full of emotion. Anger, mostly. Anger that there are people who just try to make others’ lives difficult. Anger that such people have any power, and that they abuse what power they do have. Anger that I was so emotionally affected by this (and so many other circumstances beyond my control). Anger that I couldn’t ultimately control the outcome of this–and that I hadn’t achieved the outcome I wanted. In other words, a fair amount of anger. So I tried to go deeper. I tried to figure out what my reaction said about me, and about what I value. I value justice. I value kindess. I value fairness. I also value power. And control. And getting my way. I am a mixed bag–some of it is good, some of it is bad, and some of it can get really ugly. I had just run head-on into others’ ugliest. I knew that what mattered at this point was how I would respond to it. In the midst of this realization, every negative event from the past week flew into my head. I began to give in to the ever-present temptation to complain and blame, and I started to wonder why it all has to be so damn hard sometimes.

I also realized that it’s times like these that determine who I am more than any other times. Times when I am reduced to simple emotion and utter helplessness. Times when I feel like a child again. I hate those times. I hate it when people say crap like, “Character is what a man does in the dark” and about how I should make lemonade out of lemons.

Because the fact is, I don’t much like the dark, and there is a part of me that I don’t like to show people that thinks I’ve earned the right to have someone bring me the lemonade on a silver tray. And the world, infuriatingly, does not comply with those ideas. Sometimes the world kicks my ass instead. Whom do I go to for that? WHERE’S THE JUSTICE?

Guess what? There isn’t any. There’s the idea of it, in courtrooms and legal documents, but any justice we enact is only an attempt at best. There will always be people and situations beyond our control–so what’s the point? What am I to do with what I believe when I am so eaten up with anger, frustration, sadness, grief, loss, disappointment, despair, hopelessness…that I am a walking mess of emotion trying to decide whether to hit someone or hide in my bed?

Tired of me quoting C.S. Lewis yet? Fine–I’ll quote a friend that he quoted, who said, “We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” When things are going my way, I am happy. And as long as I have happiness on my own terms, I don’t need to seek it elsewhere. I don’t need to seek him. Pain, despair, anger–they shatter my self-sufficiency, my illusion of happiness. Back to Lewis now: “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to raise a deaf world.” Fair enough. But doesn’t this raise suspicion? If he is the God of justice, then our desire for justice comes from Him. And yet he allows us to be treated unfairly. And this God who promises joy, who calls us to “rejoice always” (through Paul), who allows situations that repeatedly thwart our inclination to do so. The only answer that I can see (besides Him being a masochist, a misery I’ve given up on) is that His idea of justice, His vision of joy, is so far beyond ours and based on such a higher sense of them than mine that I don’t even begin to know what they mean. I feel like I don’t understand it, I can’t grasp it, I’m struggling to GET IT–I’m like a child.

Could it be that this is exactly where He wants me? Not out of maliciousness or spite, but because, as He said, “the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”–the children? I work with children every day–but I hate feeling like one. Yet He calls me to this position not because He desires my understanding to stay limited–but because I must recognize how limited it IS before I can truly know what grace is. He doesn’t call me to check my intellect, my desire for fairness, or my hope for joy at the door. He calls me to see how limited my understanding of these ideas is–and then He calls me to journey with Him to the truth of them all. He wants to show me not how far I’ve come–but how far He has brought me. And the journey continues.

I’m still mad. I’m praying about it, but believe me–I AM STILL MAD. Every time I picture that DVD sitting in the dark (which is also where a man’s character is shown, by the way), I struggle to stay calm. But my faith, more than just providing a quaint moral to a story or encouraging me to “make nice”, shows me there’s more to all this. There is a point here. It’s not all for nothing. Maybe at this moment, that’s all I’ve got. But I trust there is more–and that it will be more than enough. Living in the “will be” and “not yet” sometimes bites–but it means now is not all there is. And after days like today, that means more than I can even understand.