As we get ready to head for Michigan next week, I have been listening to a podcast on the fruits of the Spirit, so a lot of this is not original to me.

Between the teaching on patience and the teaching on peace, there was a quote about anger first made by C.S. Lewis: “First Hitler killed the Jews because he hated them; later, he hated the Jews because he killed them.”

I remember reading quotes about the utter contempt Germans had for Jews, as they gunned them down or gassed them, because they did not fight back. The Germans did not even regard them as a worthy enemy. So, just as studies of anger since then have shown, far from burning out their anger with violence, the more Jews they killed, the angrier the Nazis got at the Jews.

So it is with that one family member who is always angry or acting out with us as Christians. I have always thought they would eventually burn their anger out or come to their senses over how much they are hurting a person who loves them, but it seems that is not the case in the flesh, even if that person claims the name of Christ.

So how do we who are growing in our faith deal with a person who refuses to learn how to use their anger toward solving a problem, not toward ambushing another person? I think we have to understand what is our responsibility and what is God’s responsibility. Because, short of a move of the Holy Spirit in their lives, that person is not going to change.

Two solutions that do not work in the best way are fighting back or just passively letting the person attack us over and over again (that is actually not a loving thing to do to a relative who claims to be a believer because we know they will get more and more angry as we are more and more passive, and God will hold them accountable for all that).

I believe God gives us the wisdom to resist without fighting back or going into revenge mode. The motive is sheerly to protect our own family, to get us off the battlefield, so to speak. In our case, God let us see that something that was being portrayed as a chance for a happy family gathering when we return to Michigan for a wedding in July was actually going to be another ambush, so we quickly changed our accommodations to only focus on the wedding, then return home without the drama.

To use another World War II analogy, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s Jewish stepdad disguised himself as a janitor to emerge from the gas chamber at Auschwitz before the gas was turned on. He didn’t actively fight the Germans and he didn’t stand there to be gassed. He used wisdom to remove himself from the situation.

Please, let’s all pray for each other, as I believe most of us deal with that one difficult family member . . .