Prison Ministry

While teaching a class for Christian Prisoners at Palmer Correctional one Tuesday night, I was part of a group of 8 men in a small group discussion about the character quality of "Genuine Love." I wasn't all that suprised when the devil showed up. One of the men was very jumpy whenever someone passed behind him. I asked him if he knew whether or not he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He replied, "What's that." I explained what little I know about PTSD and asked him if he'd had a happy childhood. He replied, " I don't remember much of my childhood." This man is suffering from PTSD and doesn't know it. I wanted to talk to him more but had to move on. As we shared things around the table some of the other men expressed problems they were having when it comes to anger. The whole conversation shifted from Genuine Love to Anger Resolution. One man's anger flares up just because he doesn't like the way a person looks at him. Another holds his anger inside for long periods of time and then explodes all at once. A fight almost broke out when one man started making a noise that irritated another inmate (aparently he does the same thing daily just to irritate the guy). While I was helping the irritated inmate calm down, someone else took up an offense for him against the guy making the irritating noise. It was quite exciting for a few minutes. Really cool stuff to sort out. I was having so much fun rooting out all this anger that I ran out of time, led the men in prayer, and had to head for the front gate. Oh well. There's always next week. Please pray for prison ministries. The particular ministry I'm working with has been keeping stats for six years and has reduced the recidivism(hope I spelled that right-Men who get out of prison and re-offend to go right back in) rate from 80% to 20% for the men that go through our program. That is a significant benefit to Society, and Im priveleged to be a small part of that. God bless Chaplain Mike Ensche, Chaplain Paul, and all the Chaplains and volunteers.

Holiday Madness: Tips For Avoiding Holiday Anger

Remaining anger free during the holiday season presents some unusual challenges. I will attempt to communicate some tips and tricks that have proven useful to myself and others. If you have any additional helpful tips, I will be grateful to you if you put them in the comment section. With all of the additional pressures that the holidays put on our already stressful lives, it is no wonder that we struggle more with our temper at this time of year. So lets look first at why this happens, keeping in mind that these outside triggers are not to blame for our anger, but simply help us see ourselves as we truly are.
Thanksgiving and Christmas can be times of great joy, celebration, and Spiritual meaning to us, but they can also bring More Activities, opportunities to indulge in excessive food and drink, impossible scheduling challenges, loneliness, depression, and poor sleep patterns. One of the first anger generating problems that arises during this time of year is that of unmet expectations. Most of us, if we are honest, would admit to having the perfect Thanksgiving Dinner with the perfect guest list, perfect food, perfect decorations, scheduled at just the perfect time of day, with all family members and guests behaving perfectly. These expectations are not wrong, but may be very different from the expectations of others involved in our lives. Where it all goes wrong is when I view my expectations as rights that must be respected by everyone else. When I have that kind of self serving attitude, I am setting myself up for an explosive, angry Thanksgiving. If you are married you have big challenges to resolve. Your partner in life has expectations too. They may have grown up with very different holiday traditions. Maybe you and your spouse are from completely different cultures with different cultural norms for the holidays. For example: maybe you come from a family that is small, quiet, reserved, and conservative, but your mate comes from a household where loudness, chaos, and overcrowded dining rooms with small children running amok is normal. You may then have an expectation of a nice, small, quiet gathering of a couple of very close friends and your immediate family, and become very agitated to find that your spouse has invited everyone that you know plus all of the extended family who are coming in from out of town to stay at your place for a week! Then you argue your points, become angrier because you can't imagine why this person you love is so stubborn. You say things you regret in a very loud voice or worse. So the holiday becomes miserable for everyone. The key to resolving these type of problems is to have some conversations about what is to be expected before Thanksgiving actually arrives. Work out the details and negotiate compromises if necessary. If for some reason my wife is unwilling to compromise on her expectations then I need to be willing to lay mine on the alter to God and give them to him, because our personal relationship is too precious to destroy with damaging anger while trying to fight for my perceived rights. Asking the Lord daily for the power and will to respond to people with the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:22-25 tells what our behavior should look like: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit." Let's remember what the season is about also. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time of gratefulness to God for His provision of our basic needs. Christmas is supposed to be a time of rejoicing that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to be born of a virgin and to prove his identity with signs and wonders and eventually to be sacrificed for your sins and for my sins.
What else can we do when it looks like we can't have everything the way we want it? The Anger Resolution Seminar that I facilitate at ABT once a week has a section that lists five steps. I guarantee if you do these steps you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit, because they are solid, Biblical responses to suffering.

1. Give thanks - Thank God for what he is going to accomplish in my life through this difficult situation. I don't have to feel thankful to accomplish this step. I just do it out of obedience.
2. Rejoice - We are told in scripture to rejoice in the Lord always. But in order to rejoice I need to have reasons. I Look for benefits that I will receive if I properly respond to this trial. I rejoice in those benefits.
3. Engraft Scripture - As I read my Bible I look for scriptures that apply to my situation and when I find them I memorize them and use them as a shield against wrong thoughts.
4. Appeal to God - If a situation is too great for me then I cry out to God to save me from it. I appeal to his mercy to relieve suffering.
5. Triumph - Triumph over evil with good works. When I have a difficult person in my life, I ask God to reveal a unique "good work", that I can perform to benefit their life. If God doesn't reveal something I can do then I pray daily for that person. If the problem person continues to be a tormentor then I default back to step one and go all the way through step four if necessary. I then exercise the fruit of patience and wait for God to work, or reveal to me what my work is to be.

These steps are found in detail in the Anger Resolution Seminar Workbook. I typed them out from memory because they must be memorized and used often in order to be effective. I have used them so often that I can recite them forward and backward. This of course doesn't mean that I always choose to use them. I am a sinner and sometimes choose the wrong things instead of the more excellent ways of God.

Even though we have stated previously that angry outbursts are not caused by holiday stress but rather reveal the true me, my personal anger triggers are much more likely to be revealed when outside stressors are intensified. There is an acrostic used often in 12-Step Recovery circles that reminds us of the common stressors. The acrostic word is HALT. H-hungry, A-angry, L-lonely, T-tired. Let's look at the hungry, lonely and, tired parts.

When I wait too long to eat a meal because of time pressures it causes a drop in blood sugar which causes a drop in energy and in some individuals serious agitation. Unless you have properly prepared your body and planned to fast at this time, I recommend slowing down long enough to eat properly. There is much information available out there in the world about how to eat properly. Some of the information is conflicting though so find out what sounds wise to you and try it. Modify things as needed until you find a health and nutrition plan that works for your lifestyle. I personally find that my body works best when I eat mostly raw vegetables, and fruit along with a small portion of protein at three separate meals per day. My body does not respond well to white flour, sugar, or anything highly processed by manufacturing. I therefore try to avoid anything that comes from a bag or a box sitting on a grocery store shelf. Holiday time also brings opportunities to overindulge in foods or chemical substances (drugs) that will make us feel terrible. Junk food, alcohol, and drugs may become available to us at this time of year. Even just overeating at Thanksgiving or Christmas Dinners can give us what I call a food hangover. When we physically feel bad it is much more difficult to control behavior and respond correctly to difficult people and situations.

The L in HALT stands of course for lonely. For some of us the holidays can be very depressing. Do not isolate yourself in a lonely world away from those who care about you. Have a couple of trusted, and caring friends on speed dial to call if you feel down. Attend wholesome uplifting gatherings. Continue to attend your Recovery Group if you have one. Consider finding one if you don't. I recomend Recovery Groups even if you think you've got your act together. I had an old High School Coach that used to say, "There's always room for improvement!" You may discover things about yourself that you did not know and find a very enriching experience as you connect with people who are learning how to improve their lives.

The final letter is T - tired. Holiday time can be exhausting. I try to make an extra effort to get to bed early whenever I can during this time. The more sleep I can get the better able I am to cope with the outside influences that want to crowd in on me. This, for me, has also involved learning to say no to some good activities that might be fun. But, I've learned through experience that too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Also along the same lines, a good thing that is done at the wrong time or in the wrong way becomes a bad thing as well. For example: I've found that if I eat a portion of carbohydrate with a portion of fat (Popcorn with butter) after 7:00pm I will have trouble getting to sleep. Is popcorn a good thing? Oh yeah!! Can popcorn become a bad thing? Absolutely! Everything we do should be done decently and in order. Pay attention to the effects your actions cause and modify your behaviors accordingly. If you don't know how to do this then seek out how from books and people who do know how.

So, that's what I do to help prevent anger at holiday time. If you have some more ideas please comment. I am looking for any ideas that have been useful to you and thanks for reading this.

The Lord bless and keep you through the might of His power,

Jeff

States

Today I woke up on the wrong side of the bed so to speak. I was irritated and grouchy and no matter how I tried I was unable to snap out of it. I was in a state of irritation, a state of agitation. States are fascinating to me because we can suddenly find ourselves in a state of happiness or sadness or super performance where nothing can stop us. I am reading a book right now called, "Unlimited Power", by Anthony Robbins. In the book he goes into this idea of states and how they affect us. He also talks about how we can cause a shift in our state by using our mind to control certain physical things, like breathing for example. He teaches a way to actually change my state from one that is destructive to one that produces the results that I want. I am studying this right now so I am far from being able to teach it, but I am excited by the concept. Wouldn't it be great to wake up in a funk, like I did this morning, and within minutes change that funk into a state of excitement and joy to greet the new day? What if I could also use this concept to change myself from an angry state to a peaceful state by simply using my mind to control my body in various ways? I hope to learn more about this and post some more information in a future blog.

Expectations

I am pondering the effect that expectaions have on my own personal anger. We all have them, right? We expect people to talk to us with respect, treat us as adults and not children, respect our boundaries, and you fill in the blank. The problem with my expectations is that they are often not met by other people. When, for example a person talks to me with disrespect, or tells me what to do as if I am a child, then my anger tends to vent onto that person. However, they are not really the cause of my anger, they are just the trigger. The cause is that I have high expectations of how they are supposed to treat me. I must learn to submit my expectations to my Higher Power and use these times as spiritual growth times. Suffering, when responded to correctly, always brings spiritual growth because it is one of the callings to which we are called if we are Christian. When we choose to suffer instead of getting angry, God is then free to work through us as His instrument. My personal anger gets in the way of allowing the Holy Spirit to work through me. This idea is particularly important when we talk about significant, commited relationships in life. This is the proper response to unmet expectations in marriage and family unit relationships. Also with God ordained authorities in my life. These relationships represent what I believe are "Unchangeables" in my life. Because they are so sacred and unchangeable, then I must give my expectations to the Lord who has the power to change them. If I take matters into my own hands, then I becaome angry. It's simple but not easy.

Delighting In The Process

I was once told that God wants me to delight in the process of working with people. Joyfully sowing seeds of God's ways into their lives, teaching them the commands of Jesus with patience, gentleness, mercy and grace. This is easier said than done. In fact, I can't do it in my own power. I must give myself to The Holy Spirit's leading completely, allowing God to use me not as I might desire to be used but use me however He chooses. That type of Christianity is a witness to other people. I discovered that I could be "born again" yet choose to fight for "my rights". But if I yield my perceived rights to God, He is then free to operate through me at a level that I could never have imagined. If I'm yeilding my personal rights to God and operating under His authority in His will, then I have nothing to be angry about because He is working all things for my good.

I Blew It

Beginning Saturday afternoon I started having a bad attitude. I began focussing on the little annoying things about my wife. I started trying to change her ways and this began a cycle of argumentation and anger that destroyed the mood of my household all the way through Sunday afternoon. The saddest part of the whole thing is that I KNOW better.I counsel other men to avoid this trap. To enter the presence of their family members with praise as often as possible. To avoid criticism, condemnation, and blaming. But there I was doing it all wrong and feeling like a hypocrite.

Oh Lord, help me to live what I teach. Give me grace to respond to irritaions with Love, Joy, Peace, and Patience. Give my wife the grace to forgive and encourage her that this shall pass and you are working on me still. Amen.

Gratefulness

Being grateful is a key to anger resolution. Changes my focus to the good things in life and the blessings that I have.

Darryl is a man about my age who has an anger problem, a drug problem, an alcohol problem and hence a relationship with his kids and The Court System problem. Darryl has come into my life at a crossroads in his. He spent some time in jail recently for assaulting his girlfriend and at this time, he is trying to change his life around and get in right relationship with God and his fellow man.I didn't know any of this when he came to my Anger Resolution Class. He just looked like any man out of hundreds that have sat in my class, going through the painful process of resolving anger. Although I always say it's never too late to resolve your anger, you certainly could say that most men wait until it appears to be too late to start this work. They are in trouble and want me to "fix" them. They normally react with anger towards me at first when they discover that I am powerless to fix them and can only lead them through the uncomfortable process of discovering their tangled web of flawed thinking, and wrong choices. They often come with a big angry chip on their shoulder, because they feel as though they have been betrayed by those that love them and forced to get help they don't think they need. Sometimes I am attacked verbally for being the bearer of bad news; when I confront a man's violations of Biblical Standards. Some are man enough to soldier on through the process, but some are not, and retreat back into their cave to hide and control what small bit of their existence they can. They end up bitter, angry alone, and sometimes in jail.In my own recovery work as well as my work with other men I've come to realize what some of the mental strongholds are that nurture and foster a state of anger. I define strongholds as unscriptural ideas that we get from the world, the flesh, and the devil. The stronghold is actually perceived by the individual holding it to be truth. They really believe that the false idea is true and have lived life based on it. This wouldn't be so dificult to deal with if it was just one stronghold, but unfortunately most of us have developed many false ideas and concepts on which we base all of our decisions. When we have based all of our decisions on lies, it should be no wonder that our lives are a wreck. Strongholds don't have to be outright lies either. They can be half truths. For example, I know that it's wrong to go around hitting people when they trigger my anger and I would never fall for a lie that told me that was OK. But I might fall for a half truthed lie that says, "I have to ensure my kids are treated decently and my wife is not treating the kids well, so I need to smack her around because it's for the kids sake." In this example we have truth; "I need to ensure my kids are taken care of properly", but it has been mixed with a lie: "My violent action is needed to correct this problem."Many times angry folks are a product of modern church teaching that goes something like this: Come to Jesus and He'll take away your problems, heal your marriage, cure your disease, make you financially successful, and give you peace in this life. The problem with this teaching is that it's a half truth. Can Jesus solve my problems? Absolutely! Does He solve my problems, though? Is it in the best interest of His goal for me to become more like Christ to take away all of my problems? No! If Jesus took away all of my struggles I would never call on Him for help. I would never learn the character building lessons He intends and would never grow to maturity developing the life message He wants me to have for ministry. Does Jesus offer peace? Absolutely! He died so that I, who was an enemy of God through my rebellion against His ways, can now have peace with God. But the Bible doesn't promise me a peaceful life: "all who live Godly shall suffer persecution." So in most of the preaching that I hear today, people are not being prepared for suffering. This is not the evangelism model of scripture. See www.livingwaters.com for more information. People who have come to Jesus for happiness, I have found to be rather weak sisters when the going gets tough. They have not been informed that trials, temptations, persecution, and sufferings of various kinds, are all part of christianity. Therefore they end up giving up on the whole thing and become some of the most bitter anti-christian people you will ever try to reach out to. That's the end of the process, but I usually see them before that end has been completed. They are a man or woman who has come to Jesus for the wrong motivations: Happiness, success, better crowd to hang out with and so on. They, therefore have never truly repented from sin because no one has bothered to tell them what sin is. No one has confronted them and explained that sexual activity with someone they aren't married to is called fornication by God, Lieing is hated by God, hatred is the same as murder and all will be punished. People who chose to live that way will end up in hell, which is the last thing an evangelist wants. The evangelist wants a part in saving people from hell, but because he has failed to mention or warn of sin, death, and hell, that's what will happen. The Bible tells me that without repentance (turning away from sin and living God's way) there is no salvation. So I end up with a person who claims to be a Christian and has even adopted a good deal of "church speak". They say "amen", "halleluia", and "Good evening brother Jeff", but they are living and making decissions no differently than they did before their "salvation". In reality they are still ensnared by the world, the flesh, and the devil. If I ask them if they are a Christian they reply,"Yes, I'm a Christain. I'm born again. Jesus is the way." But I have to wonder about them because they are in court for assault. Their wife has a restraining order against them and has taken the kids and run to an undisclosed location filing for divorce in the process because she's tired of violent temper tantrums and living in constant fear. I ask them, "If you are a Christian then why are these fruits of evil works dominating your life? You do not exhibit any of the fruit of the Holy Spirit: Love, Joy, peace, patience, gentleness, meekness, temperence (moderation in all things), or self control. You have murder in your heart because I can see in your eyes you want to kill me for telling you these things. If you don't behave like the Bible says a Christian behaves, what makes you think you are one?" Sometimes things aren't always as the seem, but usually they are just exactly as they seem. A person who doesn't seem at all Christlike, is probably not a Christian. I of course can not know if anyone is or is not a Chriatian, but I can examine them for the fruit of the Holy Spirit and ask them to search their hearts for the truth.Getting back to Darryl who happened to be the only man in class that night. He is in a wonderful place right now. He has hit bottom and realized that his best thinking has dumped him in this lowest point in his life. He is reaching out for help with a teachable attitude. He is humbled by his inability to manage his addictions. He is seeking to know God in truth, not as a god he invented in his imagination to justify his sins. He is seeking help from other men who have traveled the road of recovery that he wants to travel. I encouraged him to hang in there and let patience have her perfect work. That life can have meaning, purpose and a duty that does sometimes bring joy, but joy is not the goal. I prayed with him and sent him home with a short reading assignment. There is hope for Darryl and I felt joy.We don't have to be continually grovelling in the mud of pleasure seeking and medicating ourselves to attempt to escape reality; destroying relationships with our wrath as we try to control and manipulate those around us. Are you tired of the struggle? Are you the smartest person you know but your life is a wreck? Do you church hop looking for the perfect church that does everything right? Do people accuse you of being angry when you don't think you are? Are your children in rebellion? Do you drive angry? Do you try really hard not to be angry, doing well for a period of time, but eventually lose it big time? Do you struggle with authorities? Have you lost or left jobs because you couldn't stand your boss or supervisor? Do you have fear, depression or moodiness? These are all just symptoms of unresolved anger that even a "born again Christian" can have. There is help out there from many great sources, my favorite of which is, "The Anger Resolution Seminar" by The Institute In Basic Life Principles. Find a siminar near you by visiting www.iblp.org or attend my class at Recovery Alaska, Anchorage Baptist Temple Room 207, 7:00 PM Thursdays.
May the Lord bless and keep you,
Jeff

Inherited Anger?

The Bible has an interesting theme that runs throughout and it involves blessings and curses that are passed on generationally because someones ancestor did something righteous or something evil respectively. Moses, Jeremiah, Daniel and others acknowledged to God the iniquities of their Father's when they prayed. Right in the passage of scripture giving us the Ten Commandments God says, "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my comandments." I remember when working on my anger in the past, reacting to this verse by saying, "Well, I don't hate God, I love God, so He's not talking about me. But Jesus said, "In as much as you have done it to the least of these...you have done it to me." How can I say I love God when I hate one who God made? Another verse supporting the concept is found in Lamentations 5:7 where it says, "Our Fathers have sinned, and are not (they are dead); and we have borne their iniquities." The Anger Resolution Seminar presented at The Anchorage Baptist Temple Thursday evenings at 7:00 P.M. goes into quite alot of detail. Come check it out to learn more. I just give you a taste of the concept here so that you can understand my interest in a news article covering the famous Hatfield and McCoy generational feud and a study of the decendants of those two families.
Here is the article in it's entirety from the Assosiated Press with the contributing Writer listed at the bottom so you can research it if you want to. The photograph above is one of the Male members of the Hatfield family taken in the late 1800's.

The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.
Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones.
No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior.
"This condition can certainly make anybody short-tempered, and if they are prone because of their personality, it can add fuel to the fire," said Dr. Revi Mathew, a Vanderbilt University endocrinologist treating one of the family members.
The Hatfields and McCoys have a storied and deadly history dating to Civil War times. Their generations of fighting over land, timber rights and even a pig are the subject of dozens of books, songs and countless jokes. Unfortunately for Appalachia, the feud is one of its greatest sources of fame.
Several genetic experts have known about the disease plaguing some of the McCoys for decades, but kept it secret. The Associated Press learned of it after several family members revealed their history to Vanderbilt doctors, who are trying to find more McCoy relatives to warn them of the risk.
One doctor who had researched the family for decades called them the "McC kindred" in a 1998 medical journal article tracing the disease through four generations.
"He said something about us never being able to get insurance" if the full family name was used, said Rita Reynolds, a Bristol, Tenn., woman with the disease. She says she is a McCoy descendant and has documents from the doctor showing his work on her family.
She is speaking up now so distant relatives might realize their risk and get help before the condition proves fatal, as it did to many of her ancestors.
Back then, "we didn't even know this existed," she said. "They just up and died."
Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.
The small, bubbly-looking orange adrenal gland sits atop each kidney and makes adrenaline and substances called catecholamines. Too much can cause high blood pressure, pounding headaches, heart palpitations, facial flushing, nausea and vomiting. There is no cure for the disease, but removing the tumors before they turn cancerous can improve survival.
Affected family members have long been known to be combative, even with their kin. Reynolds recalled her grandfather, "Smallwood" McCoy.
"When he would come to visit, everyone would run and hide. They acted like they were scared to death of him. He had a really bad temper," she said.
Her adopted daughter, another McCoy descendant, 11-year-old Winnter Reynolds, just had an adrenal tumor removed at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Teachers thought the girl had ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, Winnter says, "my parents are thinking it may be the tumor" that caused the behavior. "I've been feeling great since they took it out."
Her adoptive father, James Reynolds, said of the McCoys: "It don't take much to set them off. They've got a pretty good temper.
"Before the surgery, Winnter, when we would discipline her, she'd squeeze her fists together and get real angry and start hollering back at us, screaming and crying," he said.
As for the older McCoys, "they just started dropping dead of the tumors," he said. "They didn't know what it was. A name wasn't really put on the disease until 1968. That's when one of my brothers-in-law had to have surgery, to have some tumors removed in his brain. They started to notice tumors occurring in each of the family members."
Dr. Nuzhet Atuk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and geneticists at the University of Pennsylvania studied the family for more than 30 years, Rita Reynolds said.
"They went back on the genealogy and all of that stuff," she said. "They called it madness disease. They said that it had to be coming from the VHL. Our family would just go off, even on the doctors."
Now 85 and retired, Atuk said he could not talk about his work because of medical confidentiality.
Rita Reynolds had two adrenal tumors removed a few years ago. Her mother and three brothers also had them. So do McCoy descendants in Oregon, Michigan and Indiana, she said.
"When you have these tumors, you're easy to get upset," said Rita's mother, Goldie Hankins, 76, of Big Rock, Va., near the Kentucky-West Virginia border. "When people get on your nerves, you just can't take it. You get angry because your blood pressure was so high."
Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.
Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead.
"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Ron McCoy, 43, of Durham, N.C., one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."
"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded.
Another relative, Bo McCoy, of Waverly, Ohio, said he had never heard talk of the disease although he has been diagnosed with a different adrenal gland problem — Cushing's syndrome.
Even Reo Hatfield, who drafted the "truce" the two families famously signed in 2003 to officially end hostilities, doubted the role of the McCoys' disease in the feud.
"I would be shocked" if doctors blamed it on illness, he said.
Altina Waller, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of a book about the feud, agreed.
"Medical folks like to find these kinds of explanations. Like the Salem witchcraft thing. That book came out about how that was caused by wheat that was grown that had this parasite or mold or fungus or something that caused everybody in Salem to go nuts," she said.
"How does it explain the other dozen or so feuds that I've looked at in other places?" she asked, citing disputes over coal and other issues. "The rage and violence as such was not confined to McCoys."
She acknowledges that an argument could be made for seeing the McCoys as the more aggressive of the clans.
"One of the reasons the McCoys don't like me as much in the Tug Valley as the Hatfields do is that I seem to suggest that Randal McCoy, the patriarch of the family, was sort of irrational and flamboyant and did jump to, into wanting violence more than, say, Anderson Hatfield," Waller said.
These days, the "feud" has taken a far more civil tone and all but disappeared, members of both families say. The last time it surfaced was in January 2003. McCoy descendants sued Hatfield descendants over visitation rights to a small cemetery on an Appalachian hillside in eastern Kentucky. It holds the remains of six McCoys, some allegedly killed by the Hatfields.
___
Associated Press National Writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

You may consider checking out your own family history. Was your father, grandfather, or great grandfather angry? Are there any other issues that seem to "run in your family"? Health problems? Overeating? Undereating? Substance abuse? I am not suggesting that inherited weaknesses are the only cause of these problems, but it may well be a greater cause than we imagined.

What is God doing now?

God has been teaching me about my own personal anger lately. I spend a great deal of time helping other people resolve anger and it has been awhile since I've done any serious work on my own spirit of anger. I have noticed that I am struggling with anger turning into wrath lately and I need to deal with it. So I decided to write about it here. Maybe it will help you as you read this to see your anger as well, and lead to your own anger resolution.
I've been thinking alot lately about a word that has much to do with my own personal anger. The word is, control. I've come to realize that I sometimes use anger to control people and make them do what I want them to do. Raising my voice, slamming my fist down on the table or throwing my chair across the room are all definitely attention getters. What's more disturbing to me than this, however is that anger is only one of the weapons in my arsenal to control other people. Sometimes I use criticism, or blaming, or complaining, and about ten other behaviors to get what I want from others. It is not a good thing that I do this and it fuels my anger in several ways. First of all the desire to control others can set me up to be wrathful because it is the result of having expectations of other people that don't get met. Having expectations of people often generates anger because I really can't control how anyone else behaves. Unmet expectations usually result in anger. This desire to control and the resulting anger affects all of my relationships. Then as I "lose it" trying to control this other person it results in guilt because I know I should not be doing this behavior. The guilt then produces more anger because I'm not resolving the control issue. It becomes a downward spiral that becomes more dificult to climb out of the further down into it I go.
Those that know me understand that I believe anger is not sinful in and of itself. It only becomes sinful when I fail to deal with it quickly and it becomes wrath or malice. Wrath manifests itself in subtle ways sometimes. It doesn't necessarily result in broken household items and sore knuckles. I can express wrath by a snarky comment or sarcasm directed at some person. I can roll my eyes or give a heavy sigh in a way that expresses that I have contempt for that person and a desire to be rid of them. Unresolved anger always turns into wrath. So I end up going round and round this vicious cycle of desiring control, becoming angry because I can't control, raging to try to force the control, and finally guilt because I blew it again. This is not serenity is it? It is instead like a constant state of warfare with others.
So, I am writing this tonight with a repentant spirit and am asking God to help me find peace and serenity in my relationships. Father, take away this desire to control others and make them behave the way I want them to behave. Lord, give me the grace to accept others where they are, letting them be who they are, setting only those boundaries that are necessary for their good as well as mine; speaking truth in love without wrath of any kind.