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Believe me, I get it. I am trying hard to be a Christian. It isn’t easy for me. I have a real problem with the concept of loving my enemy.

I have feelings of anger towards a lot of things in this seemingly insane world. I feel as if I am brimming with it, like a simmering pot on a stove filled all the way up to the brim.

I need real perspective, and I feel the only way I will get it is through Christ.

The other day, I had a Freeper, out of the blue, just jumped on me (linguistingly-speaking) and was very hostile and rude because he disagreed with me. It isn’t treatment I take kindly to, and in life, my response has always welled up unbidden in me, and my anger has taken control of me, even as I have known I shouldn’t let it.

I just see red. It isn’t good, I don’t enjoy it (as some seem to do) and I wish I didn’t have such a hot head.

So, when that Freeper just attacked me in a seemingly irrational fit of vitriol, I felt my response just come to a fast boil instantly.

But I thought about that person, and knew in my heart that I knew nothing about him. Nothing. Had no idea of what paths he has walked in life. Where life has taken him. Who he has known. What he has seen.

As I thought about it, I went to his Freep page, and read his short history. War vet. Disabled. I realized that, even though the attack on me and the hatred that permeated it was so unexpected it almost didn’t register, he was someone I just felt was in real pain. And I know so little of that in my life that I should give the benefit of the doubt to someone who has known pain.

And that is how I have tried to view humblegunner. I realized after a while that nearly everyone has some good in them, for certain people in certain aspects of their lives, what thye do doesn’t bring it out in them. I figured for humblegunner, discourse in this way with people just brought out the wrong side of him.

It doesn’t play to his strengths, IMO. Could be alcohol or drugs. Could be health. Could by the psychic trials we all face as we age. Could be a rough spot in his personal life. Or he could be like many of us, disheartened, and outraged by some of the things we see, and just lashing out at people he doesn’t know.

I am trying to be a Christian, so I am trying to keep those things in mind, that I have not walked in people’s shoes, so I just don’t know. It doesn’t mean I excuse bad behavior, but it does mean I keep in mind I don’t know everything, and I hope someone might give me the benefit of the doubt, the way I am trying to give it to them.

And I am trying to accept that there is one thing, and one thing only in life you have full and complete control over, and that is your reaction to the world and events. So I have taken (with mixed success) in this forum (and my life) that if I can control my reaction to things, I am going to be happier and more level, which will keep me from eating myself from the inside out. And it is what I have been trying out in this forum. With mixed success.

And so it is with the un-named Freeper above.

And so it is with humblegunner.