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Rodents

Tuesday, 14 March, 2006

So today the brochures came for the C.S. Lewis Today conference and we spent most of the day mailing/emailing them out. I also was making a banner for the Sydney Anglicans site so that we can advertise the conference there. Then in the afternoon we couldn't get internet or email so I left earlier than planned, dropped off brochures at MM and at Moore College and went to Ashfield for counselling.

That part of Ashfield is quite pretty. It has some old beautiful houses. It also has this block which is largely dominated by an old church, its rectory, its office buildings and a dilapidated graveyard. I was half an hour early so I took a stroll around it. It's funny how we humans try to commemorate the dead by making giant structures or engraving words on stone but in the end the dead are forgotten anyway (etc. etc. Ecclesiastes).

Counselling gave me lots of things to think about. I should really write a post about anger but I am starting to find that I cannot write posts about topics like I used to. But in the flow of the narrative of my life, here are some things I have learned about anger over the course of my few short years and my few short times while in counselling:

• Anger is a defence mechanism. It rears its head when you've been hurt and, in a way, it does that to stop you from getting hurt further;
• Anger is not a sinful emotion. The Bible says you are not to sin while you are angry but there is nothing wrong with getting angry. God gets angry with righteous anger; it is also just, fair and controlled. He does not rage like we do. Obviously we cannot always have the right sort of anger but my point is that it is okay to feel angry—it's not a sin and sometimes it is even a right response to what is happening around us (e.g. doesn't the objectification of women make you mad? It makes me mad!);
• You cannot just choose not to be angry. The anger goes somewhere—it doesn't just disappear. It needs to be dealt with. It needs to be expressed. Otherwise it just pops up elsewhere where you least expect it;
• Continuing on from my last point, anger that hasn't been dealt with can manifest itself in disproportionate anger towards certain people or events. For example, my friend who stopped talking to me: it's an event that warrants, say $10 worth of anger. But I feel $100 worth of anger which means that $90 is coming from somewhere else—anger that hasn't been resolved or dealt with;
• Most people do not know how to deal with anger. Some people are very good at expressing their anger but I think the majority of people I know suppress it;
• Suppressed anger leads to depression. My counsellor was saying today that it takes a lot of energy to keep anger suppressed and so depression often results;
• There's usually a lot of energy bound up with anger and so one of the ways you can deal with it is to work off the energy—e.g. by whacking tennis balls with your tennis racquet or going for a run or yelling (maybe stand by the railway tracks and yell at the trains at they go by), etc. Once some of that energy is worked off, you're in a better position to deal with your anger.

If I think of more things, I will post them up here.

I have decided to keep going to this counsellor so I've booked myself in for two more appointments. But they are pretty spaced out so there will be some weeks when I won't be seeing her.

I was running late to get back home so that Ben and I could go to church but the traffic was pretty bad and I took a wrong turn and ended up on the way to Sydenham. It didn't matter too much though—most people weren't there. This is the first time during the eight weeks of training time at church that I've been there for dinner (normally I go and pick up Cathy) and the Thai was delicious. Then Malcolm got us to do stuff to serve the church—do this giant banner thing that he wants put up around the front (though we didn't get very far with that), do the dishes, and there were this very brave pair of volunteers who said they would clear out the FEVA cupboard in the kitchen which everyone had been trying to ignore because we all know there's a mouse in there.

I volunteered to wash up (I'm good at washing up; I just hate drying). But the whole thought of the mouse and the disgusting stuff they were pulling out of the cupboard just got me freaked and I couldn't stand to be in there while there were live rodents about. Plus Marinka and Erin kept crying out, “Ooh! I see one! Ooh! There's another!” and Marinka realised she wasn't as brave as she thought she was because the mice kept startling her. Cathy and Steve went out to get mouse traps but the place across the road didn't sell any. Malcolm apparently had some at his place but he was of the opinion that you could just whack the mice and be done with it. So he and Mark went into the kitchen with cricket bats and started trying to hit the mice with them. They crushed one and injured another (it crawled under the cupboards and they couldn't get it out. I hope it doesn't die and rot there). And then Mark and Erin finished the horrible dirty job—for which I was very very grateful. (Give me cockroaches, spiders, ants and mosquitoes over mice any day; I just cannot stand mice.)

Ben led his second seminar on music and we talked about some of the practicalities of music and how to do stuff. I realised that we have a lot of freedom in what we can do but at the same time we must also be guided by the principle of love and a desire to be welcoming to outsiders. I also wondered how much we should be catering to people who do not like to sing. But I was thinking there are no hard and fast rules about music in church and maybe it's good to do something different occasionally. More food for thought.

Anyway, I must go to sleep before my eyeballs go crazy and I seriously start to lose my vision. Tomorrow I will finish The Daily Reading Bible Volume 7, proof-read some studies for non-Christian couples planning to get married in nice church buildings and do something about the rest of The Collected Works of D. Broughton Knox Volume III.

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