"Put
on, then, garments that suit God's chosen and beloved people: compassion,
kindness, humility, gentleness, patience." (Colossians 3:12 REB)
[We]
call it gentleness, but the Greeks called it praotes. Aristotle
said that praotes was the perfect
mean between too little anger and too much anger.
[You]
thought anger was always bad?
Not
at all. No reform movement would ever
have happened if someone hadn't gotten angry about the state of things as they
found them. It was when people grew
angry about slavery that its death knell was sounded. So, too, with child labor.
But the problem is to harness that anger. That's where praotes -- gentleness --
comes in. Anger destroys even in the
name of great causes; without restraint, anger will defeat the very matters it
endorses. And our usual brand of
self-control won't make it. As William
Barclay used to say, we need to be God-controlled. That’s gentleness. Because gentleness is power under purposeful
direction.
-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in New Testament Stories from
the Back Side
#3770
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