Anger is a choice?

What a shock both my wife and I had yesterday night, as we headed out to fetch our daughter from her friend's place. The traffic outside our housing estate was like a huge "carpark" and it took us an hour to travel a mile. The reason for this is obvious....the prices of petrol was going up today and so almost everyone was filling up their tanks!

This got me thinking...we are caught in a traffic jam and there could be a 100,000 cars in this traffic, if not in KL, surely through out all of Malaysia. The cars that were heading to the petrol kiosk may not all be reading empty on their petrol gauge. We are caught in the bad traffic jam...angry and frustrated because of the hike in petrol prices.

How much would it cost us sitting in this traffic, both our time and the petrol that we are wasting and the bad feeling of anger, which will eventually, if not controlled, will cause ill health. If this calculation amounted to RM5.00 for each of us then for 100,000 cars it would have been a waste of RM500,000! This is "simple me" working it out in my head and I am not an economist.

For each of us, it will mean going through traffic, ending up in a queue and buying a very limited amount of petrol (for usually our petrol tanks are not empty). Was all that trouble worth the 40% increase we had to pay in the next few day? It will be good to do the calculation so that we can be convinced ourselves.

Anger come in many forms and towards many things and people but Scripture tell us, and rightly so:
Eph 4:26 Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:

I want to now choose to do this as often as I can, praying that the Holy Spirit will enable me to do it, when this anger thingy happens to come my way. It is all about how we think and the right decision we make. Anger is a choice!