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Latest Post
- Chapter 4: Learning to Go to Neutral
Dear Friends,
We’re four weeks into my new book about one of the most humbling years of my life. I’m posting the first five of its 28 chapters here, one per week. Today I’m posting Chapter 4. You can also read the whole book online, anytime for free at https://theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time.
Here’s Chapter 4…
Chapter 4: Learning to Go to Neutral
“May you be blessed for your good judgment and for keeping me from bloodshed this day” (1 Samuel 25:33).
On that Monday night I walked out of a meeting — it was a Celebrate Recovery meeting — drove to Walmart, and cried in the bathroom.
I’d been keeping a list that week as one of the exercises. Every time I could remember getting to that red place in my emotions — the place where my voice goes up and my hands start shaking — I wrote it down. I had a couple dozen of them by then, going back to high school, and they all had the same shape.
Somebody does something wrong. Not debatable wrong. Wrong the way a stop sign is red.
I let it go. I let it go again. I let it go a third time, because I’m a reasonable man and reasonable men don’t make a scene over one thing.
Then I finally say something, and by the time I say it I’m at a nine, and everybody in the room turns and looks at me.
That’s the part that’s hard to get through. Nobody argues about the original wrong. It just quietly leaves the room. What’s left on the table is my volume.
So that Monday night, someone said something to me that pushed me to the edge. We were in a small discussion group.
When it was my time to share, I said out loud what I was dealing with that week. That I get angry when people do the wrong thing, and they clearly know it’s the wrong thing. Then I explode and they explode back, and somehow it becomes my problem — and it is my problem at that point, because I can’t find another way to say it that it doesn’t come back on me.
I had just handed the room something soft. And that’s when someone said something back to me that landed hard. I’m sure they meant well, but it didn’t come across that way.
I couldn’t take it. I wasn’t out of control — I was standing at the edge of it and looking over, which is its own particular feeling.
So I said I couldn’t hear anything right now, that I’d just shared something vulnerable, and that I was going to have to step out and go sit in my car. I said I was sorry, and that I didn’t want to make anybody mad.
Then I walked out.
And in the parking lot, the whole thing landed on me at once. I can never come back here. I can never do ministry again.
I drove to Walmart. I don’t remember deciding to. I stood in the bathroom and cried, and then I texted two of the group leaders, who had both been sitting there watching, and apologized.
Two Verdicts, Twenty Minutes
Both of them texted back within a few minutes, and they said more or less the same thing.
No need to apologize. Proud of you for standing up for yourself. We love you. We are for you.
I read it twice.
They were proud of me?
I was standing in a Walmart bathroom, convinced I was finished.
Same room. Same twenty minutes. Two completely different verdicts.
I told Sharon about all of it that week, including the part where I couldn’t square what I saw with what they saw.
What She Said
She didn’t start with the meeting. She started with a thing I hadn’t thought to mention, which is that a few years before, I’d handled something hard well.
She said, “You can be at an emotional high — whether it’s a good high or an angry high. And in both of them, you slack. You need to return to neutral.”
The Third Option
Slack is what a rope does when the hand opens and lets go completely. Not lowered. Dropped. And that’s why I’d crash.
I’d been living with an on-off switch, not a dial.
Setting number one on my dial was hold it in. Swallow it, be gracious, be the bigger man, and add it to the pile. Setting two was splatter. Neither of them had a floor.
What I hadn’t realized on my own was that from a high — any high — the next move doesn’t have to be a crash. It can be neutral.
Neutral isn’t swallowing it. Swallowing it is what got me to the nine in the first place. Neutral is coming down off the throttle without going through the guardrail.
And it turns out I’d done it before, in the good direction. Sharon had watched me on what she called an authoritative high, in a situation where I could have said I don’t need another problem, deal with it yourself. I didn’t. I stepped in and handled it.
I’d never counted that as a skill. I’d only counted the failures. Twenty-four entries on my list, all of them losses, and not one entry for a night I came down clean.
That’s not a record. That’s a prosecution file.
Two Things
Sharon gave me two things, and they’re in order.
Find the triggers. Not the general observation about my temper — the specific list of what puts me at the edge. I already had the list. I’d made it that week without knowing I would use it here.
Then know ahead of time what you’re going to do about it. Before you’re in the room. Because in the room, there’s no deciding — in the room there’s only doing whatever you already do.
Her son gave her the sentence she uses for the second part: Is this the mountain I want to die on?
Some of them are. A few things are worth the whole nine.
What’s actually happening on an angry high, she said, is fear. That’s why I don’t want anyone near me, why everything in me is saying don’t touch me, don’t come near me. That’s not anger protecting itself. That’s fear.
And when I’m fearful, she said, others become fearful — because they don’t usually see me that way.
I thought my anger was the problem and my fear was private. They were the same weather. Everybody in that Monday night meeting could see it, but I couldn’t name it.
Then she told me about a couple she was working with, both of whom could explode. Her instruction to them was that one of them has to put their arms out. Just open your arms.
They asked her how you’re supposed to hug that.
She said, “You do. It’s a decision.”
David Had a List Too
There’s a story in 1 Samuel that’s one of the best accounts of an angry high in Scripture.
David and his men had been protecting a wealthy man’s flocks in the wilderness — a real service, unpaid, unasked for. At shearing time David sends ten men to ask, politely, for whatever Nabal can spare.
Nabal insults him and sends them back empty.
David was in the right. That’s what makes the story useful. He wasn’t imagining the slight, he wasn’t being sensitive, he hadn’t misread the situation. He had done a good thing and been treated with contempt for it.
Put on your swords, he tells them. Four hundred men, up the hill, to kill every male in the household over a refused request for food.
Nobody in that story would have called it disproportionate in the moment. He’d have gotten there and done it and had reasons the whole way.
Abigail intercepts him on the road. She brings food, she takes the blame that isn’t hers, she talks. And David stops.
“Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, who has sent you today to meet me” (1 Samuel 25:32).
He thanked her for stopping him. Not later, after he’d cooled off and thought better of it — right there on the road, still armed, he understood exactly what he’d been about to do and what it would have cost him for the rest of his life.
David went to neutral. He didn’t swallow it; the account is plain that he was furious and that his anger had a case behind it. He came down off it, on the road, because somebody stepped in front of him.
That’s what my group leaders’ texts were. Someone on a road with a donkey full of bread, telling a man with a sword that this is not the mountain.
The Car in the Middle of the Night
Months later I bought a car on a Saturday, and it wore me out. I’ve bought a lot of cars. I still never know if I’m getting the right one.
I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night certain I’d made a bad decision.
And I said to myself, Eric, put it in neutral.
The new car had a stick shift, which made it funnier at two in the morning.
I went back to sleep. I drove the car the next day and it was exactly right.
Neutral isn’t only for anger. It works on a second guess, and second guesses are the things that come for me at two in the morning far more often than rage does.
I’m not going to tell you my second guesses are always wrong. Sometimes they’re right. There are things I second-guessed about that marriage two weeks in, and I was right.
The point isn’t that the doubt is false. The point is that two in the morning is not a place where most decisions get made well.
Not a Nine
I told a friend about that Monday night some time afterward. She grew up with a father who was abusive — physically, verbally, all of it — and she has been in rooms I’ve never been in.
I described what happens to me. The shaking. Backing up. Getting myself out the door before anything comes out of my mouth that I can’t take back.
She said, “I hear what you’re saying, Eric. But believe me, that’s not a nine.”
She’d seen a nine.
I’m not putting that here to defend myself. Though I might want to.
What she corrected was the number, not the work. My scale was calibrated to my own life, the way everybody’s is, and on my scale a church meeting room on a Monday was the top of it. On hers, the top of the scale has broken furniture in it.
Both of those things are true at once, and the second one doesn’t cancel the first. Whatever number it was, people in that room could see something happening and couldn’t tell what was going to happen next. That’s the part that needed fixing, and it needed fixing at a four just the same.
Two Things You Can Do This Week
Make the list. Not a list of your character flaws — a list of the specific situations that have put you at the edge, with what happened just before each one. Mine turned out to be one repeated situation wearing twenty-four different outfits.
Then pick the one most likely to happen again, and write down the sentence you’ll say. Short. Something like I need to step out for a few minutes, or I’m not going to talk about this tonight.
Decide the exit before you need it, because you won’t be deciding anything once you’re in it.
I told Sharon, half jokingly, that if I could get to neutral maybe I wouldn’t end up crying in a bathroom at Walmart.
Then I said: although maybe you still cry.
You still cry sometimes. Neutral isn’t a personality transplant and it isn’t holy indifference. I still get to a nine — my nine. I get there less, and I get down off it faster, and I no longer write a verdict on my whole life from the parking lot.
The man I was that Monday night thought he’d proven something about himself. The other leaders, who were in the room, thought I’d done the right thing.
They were closer.
The car has a stick shift. I have to reach down and shift it.
Will you pray with me?
Father, thank You that You’re not surprised by our tempers, and that You don’t mistake our worst twenty minutes for the whole of who we are. Lord, You know the places we get to — the ones where we can feel our own control getting thin. Show us the triggers before we’re standing in them. Give us the words ahead of time, and the humility to write them down like a man who knows he’ll need them. Where fear has been driving and we’ve been calling it conviction, tell us the truth about it. And thank You for the people You send out onto the road to stand in front of us. Help us to bless them for it instead of driving around them. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Questions for Reflection
1. Read 1 Samuel 25:2-35. What had David actually done for Nabal, and what was he planning to do about the insult? Was he wrong about the facts?
2. Look at David’s words to Abigail in verses 32-33. What does he thank her for, and how quickly does he say it? What does that suggest about how fast a person can come down off an angry high when somebody steps in?
3. Think of the last three times your reaction went further than you meant it to. What happened in the ten minutes before each one? Is it the same thing three times?
4. Pick the situation most likely to come around again this month. What’s the one short sentence you’ll say, and where will you go afterward? Write both down now, while nothing is happening.
Next week: Chapter 5, “It Doesn’t Get a Vote,” with a story about needles, a CAT scan and one very patient nurse.
Read or listen to the rest of the book, free, at theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time, where you’ll also find the paperback, Kindle, Audible and Google Play editions.
You’ve steadied me more than you know. Thank you for walking with me.
Love,
Eric Elder writes for page, stage & screen to glorify God’s name so Christ may be seen! Hit reply to send Eric a note! Use this link to subscribe or unsubscribe.