Slow to Anger Is a Speed

The thing she watches for takes about half a second and most people never know they have done it.

You will have seen it without noticing. Somebody says a difficult thing, and there is a flicker on the listener's face before the settled response arrives. It is not a decision. It is what happens underneath a decision, in the moment before a person gathers themselves and produces the kind version.

She notices it every time. She has done for years. And she is not wrong about what she is seeing.

Now, that is a skill, and skills are neutral, and this one has protected her more than once. What it has also done is make every difficult conversation into a piece of surveillance, and at some point, without any decision being made, it moved from other people's faces to God's.

So when she prays about the matter, and she does, she is watching. Not for words. For the flicker. She has an idea of what would cross a face in the half second before mercy gets organized, and she has been bracing for it for three years, and the bracing is now what praying feels like.

She has never once asked herself whether there is a half second.

That is you at the door.

You've been watching for a flicker. And you are right about faces in general, which is what makes this so hard to shift, and you have applied a true observation about human beings to Somebody the observation was never about.

Slow to anger is a description of speed

David writes a line that is quoted so often it has gone smooth, and I want to slow it down, because one phrase in it is doing exactly the work you need.

The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy.Psalm 145:8

Slow to anger.

That is not a statement about God's temperament in general. It is a statement about a speed. It says that whatever else happens, the moving toward anger is the slow part, and if a thing is slow it does not arrive in half a second.

Which means the flicker you are watching for cannot occur. Not because He hides it. Because the verse describes a rate, and the rate rules out the thing you are braced for, and there is no version of slow that includes an involuntary flash before anybody gathers themselves.

You are watching for something that is ruled out by the speed named in that verse, and I am not being gentle with the text: Psalm 145:8 says slow to anger, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my quietness who can bring it into three years of surveillance.

Now look at what the verse puts first, because order matters in a list like this. Gracious. Then full of compassion. Both of those come before anger is mentioned at all, and anger, when it appears, appears with a brake on it.

I want to sit here rather than hurry, because a person who reads faces has usually had to learn it, and the learning was not free. Somebody's face taught you this. Possibly several. And the skill kept you safe, and I would not take it off you for anything, because there are rooms where it is the right instrument.

What I would like to hand you is this: the instrument is calibrated for a class of face that does not include His.

You have been running an accurate instrument on the one face it was never built to read, which is written into the speed rather than into my sympathy for what taught you, with the Spirit of God able to make a hand come down that reasoning has not.

And the last phrase, which people skip because it sounds like more of the same. Of great mercy. Great is a word about quantity. Not sufficient mercy, not adequate mercy, not enough to cover this. A great deal of it, in a verse that has already told you the anger moves slowly.

This face has no half second in it, and the verse rules it out by naming a rate, because Scripture says slow, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that to a doorway on a wet evening.