Do You Have Emotional Cancer?

What an interesting question!

A person has emotional cancer when they carry around resentments.  This is what Scripture says about resentment:

Job 5:2 – Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.  (NIV)

Resentment kills, that is plain and simple.  I suppose the question now becomes, how does it do that?  Let’s look at it.

Webster’s dictionary defines resentment like this:

A feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult or injury.

This is helpful because it points us to the source of resentments, but is not a good definition.  When we experience real or perceived wrongs, insults or injuries, our feelings are not primarily those of “indignant displeasure” or “persistent ill will”.  The feeling that overrides all others is that of anger.  We may certainly feel things such as ill will or indignant displeasure, and just as certainly these will end up directing our emotional response to anger.

Now this anger we feel is not the “flash in the pan” type anger, it is the “I’m hanging onto this negative feeling because I’ve been wronged” type of anger.  You know, the kind that sticks inside and stirs a person up.  The problem is, no emotion lasts forever, eventually it has to get resolved in some way.  The way we resolve this type of anger is to convert it into a resentment for storage as an attitude in our hearts.

The great advantage for us here is that whenever we want, and particularly whenever we perceive we have been wronged, we can bring that old anger right back up again and spew it out.

Now, over a period of time we get angry by dragging up the old resentments and from new real or perceived offenses against us or our loved ones.  The result of this is that we start to store more and more resentments in our hearts.  Soon, if we don’t take corrective actions, the heart becomes full of resentments.  Then they start to grow together as we cannot tell which resentments go with which offenses and whom they relate to.  They have become emotional cancer.

As this emotional cancer spreads we become out of control people, in the sense that we no longer are able to hide our problem from others.  They can see the emotional cancer in our angry faces, they can hear it in our angry voices and they experience it in our angry gestures and actions.  It literally oozes like poison from the inside of our souls.  When we have this kind of problem, we are often the last to know, but there are some clues that we can recognize if we really pay attention to our behaviors and the actions of others around us.

If we have significant periods of feeling depression, it could be emotional cancer.  If people do their best to avoid us, it could be emotional cancer.  If we are constantly discontent and whiney, it could be emotional cancer.  If we get angry for almost no reason, it could be emotional cancer.  If we blow up in rages frequently, it could be emotional cancer.  Do any of these things sound familiar?  If they do, seek godly counsel, because it won’t get better by itself, and you may be out of control to the point that you can’t stop being resentful.

Doing nothing is foolish, and our Scripture says it very clearly:

Resentment kills a fool!

So, the question is, “Do you have emotional cancer”?