Is Anger Really Worth It? || Victory Church [Cafe Convos #5]

Crystal Hill. Corey Bowie. Hi. Hey. Good to see you. Good to see you. So welcome to the cafe. I've been inviting all my friends here to have a little conversation, but to also kind of expand my palate. I am not a coffee drinker. I don't really do cafes that much. My wife loves all the cafes, but not me. But in an effort to kind of like what my friends like, I'm asking them to share with me their drink of choice. So I see this very colorful situation here before me, and I would love for you to tell me what I'm about to drink. So first I want to say, I love that you're doing this because my husband also hates coffee. Okay. Good man. This does not look like coffee though. It's not. So it's tea. Tea. All right. It's actually a matcha lemonade. It's a blueberry matcha lemonade. So I was inspired to see,

it's in the Victory House Worship Cup. So our cafe, I don't know if you knew this, but they come up with a signature drink when we have a release for Victory House Worship. And this is very similar to one of their recent Victory House Worship signature drinks. So I wanted you to try it. Are there like verses attached to like these drinks? No, it's not that deep. This one would be great for like Psalms. So at 23, you make me lie down in green pastures. Let's go to the pastime world with the boys. Let's do it. I love it. All right, so this is- You gotta do a straw. This is a girly drink. Okay. Oh boy. I live in a house full of women, so I mean, what's new? All right, so again, this is a blueberry matcha lemonade. Cheers. Let's do it. See, it was deceiving. Not in a good way. It hit my tongue and I was like, oh, this might be right. And then the green settled. If I was really thirsty and there was nothing else to drink, I would drink this. That is a low bar, sir. I'm just saying.

It will quench my thirst. It will. And I would not die of thirst because I would drink this. But I don't think, I think you have helped me. Because I was just last week thinking like, I have never had matcha, nor do I have the desire to have it because it looks like wet grass. I had wet dirt with somebody else and this, or hot dirt with somebody else, and this is like wet grass. And this has confirmed that I no longer ever have to try matcha. Can you think of some times where like some people or some situations that you was legit mad at them? You know what I'm saying? Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. When I was younger, I had a temper, like a real bad one. Really? Like I would fight. Like you would like just, you would fight like fist fight? Yeah. No, throw them balls. Come on, Chris. I cannot see it. Like tie back the hair and everything. Yeah. Let's go. That's real. That's real.

I know. Isn't that terrible? That's so bad. So bad. You ever lose any fights? I'm sorry, I got it. Well, not any that I initiated, but I did get jumped one time and it was an anger thing, actually. This is crazy. I was a teenager. I was 17. Stopped at a stop sign. Someone was coming through. It was like a four-way stop and they, I was turning left and they didn't stop at the stop sign. So I almost hit them. 16 year old me, honked my horn and pointed my tallest finger at them. And I moved on with my day, you know? I just caught what you said on tallest finger. That's great. I've never heard it referenced like that. That's great. And then I move on with my day. I pull up at a curb. I'm getting something out of my car. I'm bent into my car to pull this box out. And all of a sudden I get grabbed by the back of my hair and pulled out of my car and thrown on the cement.

And there were these two women that I made them mad because I honked at them and pointed. Threw up your tallest finger. Yeah. They beat you down. They got me. And I was outside of my parents' business at the time. My mom was inside working and she comes running out and she's like, don't hit my daughter. Don't hit my daughter. It was a crazy moment. She didn't jump in. She just said, hey. Well, she did. She did enough for me to get up and run inside and call the police. Okay. Get away from the danger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crazy story. There was a customer in there that went out to her car. She had a gun in the car. It was, it was crazy. By that time, they had gotten out. Yo, this sounds like a movie. It was wild. It was the hard streets of Lawrenceville, you know? Hey, Lawrenceville? Lawrenceville got some real fire. It's insane.

It is, no, you're right. You're right. That's what, so it's, I think that is one of the dangers of like our anger. Oh yeah. Like we can think we're doing something that is not really impacting someone and it can trigger something in someone else that we never intended. And sometimes when that thing is triggered, it's an emotional reaction. It's not a response. It's a reaction. And I was just thinking about this, this, this morning, like the difference between when we react and when we respond. It's like, when we react, it's just all emotion. It's just all intense. It's right in the moment. When we respond, we got. chance to kind of pause, process it, think about it, so that we can actually respond with something healthy. But man, anger, don't play the response game. It's like, hey, I'm jumping in it, I'm jumping in it right now. I was just reading this morning, James 1, 19 and 20 says, James, Jesus's brother coming through, he said, my dearest brothers and sisters, take this to heart, be quick to listen, slow to speak and be slow to become angry

for human anger is never a legitimate tool to promote God's righteous purpose. We can be angry about certain things, but how we act it out, if we are not taking the time to listen, to process and acting in pure emotion, I really feel like pure emotion is probably more of our flesh than our spirit. You know what I'm saying? That's just Corey's perspective, we have to kind of process what are we angry about? Like, where's the root of that anger? And then how are we showing that and expressing it? Me cussing somebody out in anger, who is that gonna help? Me yelling at my wife when we get into an argument, that's not helping us getting closer to the resolve. I think we just have to find, be able to try our best to recognize that anger is a normal human emotion. We will feel it, but just because we feel it, don't mean we have to act on it. Yeah, that's good. I think I learned something this past year, I had to take some time away. I had hit total burnout. Yeah, just going too hard. It wasn't actually going too hard, that was just the coping mechanism. Going too hard was the coping mechanism

for not dealing with stuff from my childhood, that it just was unaddressed for, I mean, I'm about to be, I'll be 39 next month. Come on, 39. I know, right? Yeah. I was getting too emotionally invested in too many things. Facts. And what I realized is that if I could filter everything through, is this a conviction or is this an opinion? Then I can actually respond appropriately. Like your conviction or your opinion? Yes. Oh, gotcha. Because if it's my opinion, I can hold that loosely and it's not worth my anger. It's not worth someone else's. Offense. Yeah, exactly. If it's a conviction, if it's something that I've processed with the Lord and I am convicted, like I don't, I choose that word very purposely. If it's a conviction from the Lord, I'm gonna fight for that. And if that involves righteous anger, again, now there's still respect and things like that,

but then I gotta be okay with that because I don't think that we are meant to just lay down our convictions. Right, right. Opinions, yeah, trash. Yeah, the opinion's gotta die. When I think about angry, anger, and strife. Right, strife. I think about when I hear the word strife, that is something that I can like, you know, you hear about like don't sow strife, like don't sow anger, don't do things, plant seeds to get people all riled up. But I also think about strife and like anger that has not been let go of. Like you're just holding onto an offense, you know, and it just sits in there. You know what I'm saying? You just hold onto it. How do we go through the feeling of anger, whether it's righteous or whether it's just human, whatever, but how do we not allow it to just like plant roots in us so that there's just like this living strife against a person or a thing or an organization or whatever? What do you think? Yeah, that's good. I think it's all about having a healthy conversation. It's sitting here and having, trying to understand what the other person likes.

So, you know, it's what you're doing right now. It's bringing to light what's been shoved into the darkness. And so most of the time that people are angry about something, I'll say for me, that I am angry about something. It's a misunderstanding. I didn't understand their motives or I didn't have the full story or I didn't, it's on me. And so therefore it's on me to go ask the question and say, hey, Corey, when you did that thing, that hurt my feelings. Can you help me understand why you did that? And can you just listen to me and make space for me while I tell you how it made me feel? Once you do that, I mean, if you have the right approach everything can be resolved. It takes patience and a desire to understand. I think when we finally land on it's not our job to change people. Like people are gonna be who they are. They're gonna think the way they think and we can let go of trying to change people. We will save ourselves from so much frustration and anger or even striped judgment. I think we can write a book on that. Let's do it. Write a book on that and not matcha. I don't know if I have the patience for a book, but we could write a song. Don't drink matcha, anger is nacha.

Ooh, let's go. Yeah. Hey, it's copyrighted and you can't take it, guys. Nobody else in the room, it's me and Crystal right there. I mean, that one was just you. Thanks for being a part of Victory Church on the Pando app. We hope this content was a blessing to you, but we want you to know that you're not done yet because we want to hear from you. So send us a letter and tell us things like what God is doing in your life, how we can pray for you, or even content that you would like to see us create in the future. We just want you to know that we see you, you're important to us, and we'd love to continue to create some things in the future that will bless you. So send us a letter and we hope to hear from you soon.