Does God have a garbage disposal?

It's nearly 3:30 a.m. and for some reason I'm wide awake.  However, the house and my mind are both quiet so I thought I'd post.

Sunday night, the evening before my cousin's funeral, I had the oddest dream.  I dreamed that I walked into a dentist's office and encountered Matt, one of the people who bullied me terribly and turned high school into 4 years of hell.  He was genuinely happy to see me.  I was genuinely pissed off to be in the same room with him and let him know it.  I sat on the receptionist's desk while he tried to talk to me and steadily tried to hate him.  He really wanted me to forgive him and I was close to doing it but I was afraid to.  I didn't trust him to be the nice guy he was, plus I was in the habit of hating him passionately, as I have in reality for quite some time.  It was hurting him, that much I could see.  The next thing I knew, my arms were around his neck and all was forgiven.  After that it got weird because then I found myself in bed with him.  Thankfully, just before one of us lit a cigarette, I woke up.

At B's funeral, the pastor talked about how B battled his demons all his life, anger being one of them.  I have to admit, there's a huge stain of anger in my family, and it's not petulant, spoiled-brat anger but justifiable ire.  It's been passed down several generations and when it reached B it got kind of scary.  He had been teaching a class at a local tech college and the people there, both students and faculty, got into the lamentable habit of making fun of him incessantly.  It lasted for a couple of years until it grew so intolerable that he got a gun, put it in his car, drove over to school and told his tormentors that he'd start shooting if they didn't stop.  As you can imagine, all hell broke loose.  The campus was thrown into lock-down.  He was arrested and placed in the county mental hospital for several days observation.  When questioned by authorities, he told them that he never intended to open fire, just to scare his tormentors into leaving him alone.

I sat in the church listening to the eulogy, thinking of this story and of my strange dream.  What crossed my mind next was the idea of how short our lives are, and how important it is to get rid of toxic crap like rage.  For a few seconds I got a feeling of the most incredible peace and security and utter freedom that must come with the ability to forgive and leave all the crap of the past behind.  Forget the whole idea of accounts payable and just lay it all to rest.  And I thought of how nice it would be to do that well before our time is up, rather than at the 11th hour.  My insides felt like they'd been scoured clean of a lot of slime and muck and filth.  I freely confess that I hold grudges and find it very difficult to forgive.  This seems to be a trait that runs in my family - not that I'm judging, though.

Since the eulogy, I've been wondering.  What happens with anger?  What does God do with anger or any negative emotion when one of His kids prays and spills his/her guts?  We all know what anger can do to people, physically and mentally.  We see it manifested as illness.  I know that I've had some of my worst colds after a bout of terrible anger and upset, and Freud says that depression is anger turned inwards.  I can dig that, too.  Anger can lead to verbal and physical fights, murder, rape, theft, you name it.  But once it's over, where does it go?  I recently read that an emotional state is a state of energy and we all know that emotions have some sort of vibe but I can't help but think that emotions, particularly strong ones, must have actual molecular structure and they must leave a trace.  Where do those traces go?  If you turn to God in your rage or fear or sadness what does He do with the atoms?  I can't imagine why He'd want that kind of trash lying around His house.  Does He have some sort of garbage disposal or a machine that turns crap into mulch?  Does that mulch go on His garden or on ours?  Does He let it go to some distant part of the universe so it can get sucked into a Black Hole and become nothingness?

I know I need to learn how to forgive.  Right now, all I can manage is saying a little prayer for my enemies once a day.  I ask God to bless anyone who has ever messed with me or inconvenienced me, intentionally or unintentionally, directly or indirectly and then I ask Him to grant those people good health and to give them whatever it is they most need in this life, both spiritually and temporally.  I haven't been doing this for more than a few weeks and I don't know if it's working yet but it's got to be worth something doesn't it?  All I know is that the family anger has got to stop somewhere.  I don't want to waste the remainder of my life, pissed off and hating people.  I want that crap to go in God's mulcher long before my 11th hour arrives.